Data Engineer
About us
Food waste is a $1 trillion problem – costing the world over 1% of global GDP. We’re dead set on solving the problem and looking for people to help us achieve our mission. We, at Winnow, believe that food is far too valuable to waste, and that technology can transform the way we produce food. Our team is made of people who all share a passion for food and technology.
Winnow was founded in London in 2013 to help the hospitality industry prevent food waste through internet of things tools in the kitchen. We have worked with thousands of sites and are operating in over 90 countries around the world supported by our offices in London, Dubai, Singapore, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Chicago. We are a scale-up stage company with a strong base of clients who are rolling out our system globally. We have blue-chip customers including Accor Hotels, IKEA, IHG, Marriott, Compass Group and many others.
Winnow’s clients on average reduce waste by over 50% by value and sustain savings. Winnow works with hotels, universities and schools, staff restaurants, event/hospitality kitchens, buffets, pubs, and high street restaurants. Where the system is permanently adopted, pre-consumer waste value is reduced by 50% - 70% with no detrimental impact to the perceived quality or value of the offer to their customers. This represents a typical improvement of food cost savings of 3% to 8%, commonly a 40%+ increase in profitability for operations.
As the global leader in addressing food waste, we are committed to continue pushing the envelope on what technology can do to solve this problem. Winnow Vision, our new artificial intelligence-based technology, is trained to automatically track all food waste thrown away. It has won awards at the World Economic Forum and has received tremendous enthusiasm from our clients and the industry. You can read more about it on our website.
Other recent accolades saw Winnow listed in the 2025 Sunday Times Best Places to Work - a recognition based on feedback from our UK team. While this award is based in the UK, it reflects something global: a culture built on purpose, collaboration, and the belief that businesses can - and should - tackle real-world problems while being great places to work. Previous awards saw Winnow in the top 10 of the FoodTech 500 awards - the worlds first definitive list of the global entrepreneurial talent at the intersection between food, technology and sustainability, as well as winning Impact 50's most impactful companies to work for. You can read more about it here.
We are passionate about living our values and place them at the centre of everything we do. We are excited about like minded talent who share these values, joining us in our mission:
Equal parts head and heart. We’re both passionate and measured. We carefully balance the need for quick solutions and pragmatism with the ability to step back, take in the bigger picture and build for the long term.
Bravely honest. With each other, that means we’re a transparent organisation where healthy, respectful debate is encouraged. With our customers, we challenge them if we don’t think they’re achieving their goals, whether they be environmental or financial.
People of action. Done is better than perfect, and we learn by boldly doing then rapidly improving. We’re breaking new ground, so we know things might go wrong. But we judge ourselves and each other on our reaction and our resilience.
Bound by food. We’re a diverse bunch, but our belief in the value of food is the common thread in everything we do. With each other, we celebrate through our love and respect for food. With our customers, it means we work hard to develop creative tools to make it easy for chefs to value food.
Hungry and humble. Our product is revolutionary, our people are impressive, and we’re hungry for change. But, we’re just the catalyst for a bigger movement. We stay humble regardless of our success, and make chefs the heroes in this journey.
People and planet positive. We’re caretakers of the planet, helping to preserve and support it for now and the future. Our work already minimises the impact that the hospitality industry has on the planet, and we’re also committed to actively reducing our own footprint while doing so. We’re leaving the planet and its people better off than we found them.
This is an opportunity to join an exciting organisation and help us propel our growth at what are truly the most exciting and dynamic points in time in our business. You will work alongside a driven team who are motivated by building an exciting business and leaving the world a better place than we found it.
About the role
We're looking for a Data Engineer to join our Data Science and ML team. You'll take ownership of our existing data pipelines and infrastructure - ensuring they remain robust, scalable, and ready to support new analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives.
You'll be responsible for maintaining and improving Airflow pipelines, AWS-based data workflows, and data transformation processes that power Winnow's internal insights and machine learning models.
Key responsibilities
- Ensure data quality, reliability, and lineage across internal and external datasets.
- Maintain CI/CD workflows for data engineering projects, using Git and deployment automation tools.
- Manage and optimise Airflow DAGs that orchestrate Winnow's data ingestion and transformation workflows.
- Collaborate with analytics, ML and product teams to deliver clean data for dashboards, insights, and model training.
- Deliver ad-hoc analysis based on the outputs of this data pipeline
- Maintain, advise and implement enhancements on our AWS-based data infrastructure, including services like Redshift S3, Glue and Athena.
- Design and implement scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for both batch and incremental data flows from multiple systems.
- Creating and maintaining observability infrastructure over the ETL pipeline so that we are proactively alerted on pipeline performance issues/potential downstream data inconsistencies etc.
- Contribute to the documentation and standardization of Winnow's data engineering best practices.
Requirements
Essential:
- Python and SQL skills for data transformation and automation.
- Comfort working with large datasets and optimising data processes for performance and scalability.
- Experience with ETL orchestration tooling that manages pipelines in production.
- Understanding of data warehousing ETL best practices.
- Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
- Experience working with CI/CD tools and Git-based version control.
- Experience presenting findings and methodology to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Familiarity with containers and container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes
Nice to Have:
- Strong experience with AWS cloud infrastructure
- Experience integrating data for AI/ML pipelines or real-time analytics.
- Experience authoring Jenkins pipelines for CI
Benefits
- Competitive base salary
- Meal tickets - 40 RON per working day
- 2 Wellness hours per month plus a 274 RON gross monthly wellness allowance or the option to swap the wellness allowance for a 7Card subscription
- 25 days of paid vacation time in addition to national holidays, plus the option to buy a further 5 days annual leave
- Company part-funded private health insurance and eye care allowance
- Life insurance (3 times base salary)
- Company stock options package
- Eligible for discretionary annual bonus
- Employee Assistance Programme - 24/7 helpline for your wellbeing
- Learning and development allowance of 1,730 RON annually
- Hybrid way of working - we’re all in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays
- Company provided breakfast & snacks on office days
- Early Finish Fridays - log off at 3 PM on a Friday if you have completed your tasks by then
- Our own office space with a great working environment
- You will love what you do – waking up every day solving one of the biggest social problems of our generation - food waste
- Committed team members with broad experience who share a common passion to build a world class business