Lead Analytics Engineer (6-month contract)

Most money apps talk at you. Cleo talks back

We're not building another finance app. We're building the world's first AI financial assistant, one that actually understands your money and makes you better at it, and we're changing the world's relationship with money in the process For everyone, whatever their background or balance.

The proof: profitable, fast-growing, a unicorn with over $300M in ARR, and millions of people who now feel differently about their money.

We love original thinkers who challenge the status quo. We move fast, tell the truth, and there's nowhere to hide from good work here. If that excites you more than it scares you, you'll fit right in.

Follow us on LinkedIn for new features and the occasional roast

Meet the team

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Here at Cleo, we have ~200 Engineers organised into Pillars. Our stack spans a Ruby on Rails monolith, a single React Native (TypeScript) app frontend, Python for machine learning services, and PostgreSQL, all hosted on AWS and shipped through Kubernetes - backend goes out multiple times a week, app releases to Google and Apple at least weekly. To thrive here, our engineers proactively use our Engineering Principles to guide daily decisions, take ownership of problems beyond their own squad to drive broader impact, and actively drive their own learning, development, and growth.

About the role

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• Contract: Up to six months, with a formal review at the end of month four
• Team: People Analytics, partnering across Data and People

We are looking for a Lead Analytics Engineer to own the architecture and modelling for this work. You will partner with the teams responsible for our People systems, data platform, security and privacy, turning source data into trusted datasets that People Analytics and leadership can use.

Cleo's People data spans core employee, recruitment, performance and engagement systems. We need a reliable foundation that connects these sources, preserves change over time and enables sensitive workforce information to be used safely.

This is a time-bound assignment for someone who can make difficult technical decisions independently, work across Analytics, Security, Privacy and the People team, and leave the domain supportable after handover. The work is ordered by priority. New requests will replace an agreed deliverable rather than stack on top.

What you'll be doing

• Designing and building trusted models for hiring and applicant-tracking data from Ashby, and talent and performance data from HiBob, including source mappings, keys, history and reconciliation.
• Strengthening the core employee model so it reliably represents employees, jobs, teams, managers and change over time.
• Bringing engagement and survey data into the People data foundation in a consistent and reusable way.
• Setting clear model boundaries, grain, naming, tests, documentation and data contracts across the People domain.
• Identifying and resolving duplicate, legacy or conflicting People models without silently breaking downstream use.
• Designing a secure architecture for compensation, workforce cost and other highly restricted fields. Normal analytical use should rely on masked, aggregated or purpose-specific outputs rather than broad access to raw employee-level data.
• Designing and building a People data access-audit layer that makes restricted queries attributable to a named identity, retains useful evidence, and alerts the right owner to agreed unauthorised or high-risk access patterns.
• Working with Security, Privacy, Finance, Reward and business owners to agree access rules, disclosure controls and acceptance before restricted data is used.
• Creating a small set of clear, governed workforce measures and datasets for leadership reporting, while using the native reporting in People systems where it already meets the need.
• Adding tests, monitoring, failure routes, runbooks and handover evidence so permanent owners can operate and change the work after the contract ends.
• Enabling People Analytics to focus on workforce and hiring questions by providing reliable, secure and reusable data foundations.

What we're looking for

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Must-haves

• Significant production Analytics Engineering experience, including technical leadership for a critical data domain.
• Expert SQL and dbt, with strong judgement on source, staging, intermediate, mart and semantic-layer design.
• Experience making architectural decisions about grain, history, slowly changing dimensions, incremental strategies, legacy boundaries and model contracts.
• Experience leading a source-system migration or cutover while preserving history and reconciling outputs.
• Strong data security and governance experience, including named access, least privilege, restricted schemas, masking or column controls, and auditable use of sensitive data.
• Experience using warehouse access and query logs to create useful monitoring, investigation evidence or alerts.
• Strong Git, PR review, testing, documentation and production-support habits.
• The ability to explain technical choices and trade-offs clearly to Analytics, Security and non-technical business owners.
• Evidence of leaving a complex data domain maintainable after handover.
• Sound judgement and discretion when working with confidential employee, compensation and performance information.

Nice-to-haves

• Hands-on experience with HiBob or Ashby. Experience with another HRIS or ATS is also useful.
• Experience working with engagement or survey data.
• People or HR data experience, including effective-dated employment and organisation history.
• Redshift, Airflow, Fivetran, Lake Formation or similar access-control and orchestration tooling.
• Experience designing privacy-preserving analytical products for compensation or other highly restricted data.
• Experience leading a data domain independently while partnering effectively with platform and engineering teams.

The role will partner with the teams responsible for source systems and ingestion, while owning the design and quality of the People data models and foundations delivered through the assignment.

What we offer

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We offer benefits package built to support you in and out of work. Benefits vary by country and include meaningful equity, comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance, mental health support, a paid one-month sabbatical after four years, a learning and development platform, pension or retirement contributions, and location-specific leave entitlements.

For the full breakdown on what's available in your location, visit our Candidate Hub

What Matters

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Cleo's mission is to change the world's relationship with money. We can't do that without building a brilliant, genuinely diverse team - and making sure our hiring process gives everyone a fair shot, running a fair and transparent recruitment process in which every candidate is considered on their metris.

We're glad to make reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process. If there's anything we can do to support you in showing us your best, please let your recruiter or one of the team know.

We may use AI-assisted tools during the recruitment process to take support the team in different ways like taking notes or referring back to conversations. They do not replace the team and all applications are reviewed by a Cleo employee thoroughly!

Compensation Range: £95K - £120K