Staff Data Engineer
Remote, United States
$200,000 to $250,000 base
AI-powered vertical data platform
We are working with a high-growth AI technology company building a data-rich platform for a large, relationship-driven industry undergoing rapid digital transformation.
The business has strong commercial traction, significant investor backing, and is investing heavily in AI product and engineering as it scales a platform used by thousands of professionals to manage digital growth, customer engagement, and operational workflows.
They are hiring a Staff Data Engineer to join a small, senior data platform team responsible for one of the company’s most important technical systems: ingesting, normalizing, and serving high-volume third-party data from hundreds of fragmented external sources.
This is a hands-on staff-level role for someone who enjoys hard data infrastructure problems, distributed systems, backend engineering, and the practical use of AI to improve operational workflows.
About the Role
You will help lead the next phase of a large-scale data platform that powers customer-facing products, internal automation, search and discovery features, recommendations, and AI-enabled workflows.
The core platform is already live, but there is significant work ahead around scalability, reliability, cost optimization, data quality, observability, and automation.
The team works across streaming and batch data pipelines, backend services, orchestration, data lake infrastructure, and AI agents that support internal teams by reducing manual investigation, improving issue triage, and accelerating data onboarding.
This is not a narrow data pipeline role. You will be expected to shape architecture, work directly with product and engineering stakeholders, and stay close to implementation.
What You’ll Do
Tech Stack & Environment
The environment includes Python and Java backend services, Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes, AWS, EMR, data lake infrastructure, SQL, and modern observability tooling.
The company is also working with AI agent frameworks and LLM-powered workflows to automate internal processes and improve data operations. Experience with tools such as LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI, Claude Code, or similar frameworks is useful, but strong engineering fundamentals matter most.
What We’re Looking For
Nice to Have
Why This Role Is Interesting
You will join a small team with ownership over a very large technical surface area. The platform handles complex, messy, high-value third-party data across hundreds of sources, and the work has a direct impact on customer-facing products and internal AI automation.
The company is pushing AI into real operational workflows, not treating it as a side experiment. This role offers the chance to work on practical AI automation, high-scale data infrastructure, and backend systems in one position.
It is a strong fit for someone who wants staff-level scope without losing the ability to build.
About People In AI
People In AI partners with high-growth AI and technology companies to help them hire specialist technical talent. We work closely with hiring teams to understand the role, the technical environment, and the expectations before speaking with candidates, so conversations are focused, transparent, and useful from the start.
