Staff Data Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote - Canada

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building and deploying AI co-workers and enterprise systems for clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

• Define data architecture and platform strategy across scalable pipelines, warehouses, and data lakes.
• Build and optimize batch and real-time data pipelines, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and CI/CD automation.
• Establish data governance, quality, compliance, contracts, and event flows across the platform.
• Design data pipelines for production AI/ML systems, including embeddings, vector stores, RAG preparation, feature stores, and training and inference flows.
• Modernize data platforms for performance, cost efficiency, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Partner with leadership and engineering, analytics, AI, and product teams while setting standards and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional data engineering experience leading complex data platform initiatives.
• Strong system architecture background with expertise in distributed data systems, cloud-native data platforms, and enterprise data warehousing.
• Expert proficiency in Python, Scala, and SQL.
• Experience with orchestration, streaming and real-time processing platforms such as Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub; data modeling; transformation; governance; and compliance.
• Experience with container orchestration, CI/CD, and production AI/ML data pipelines, including embeddings, vector stores, RAG, feature stores, and training and inference flows.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentoring, stakeholder communication, problem-solving, and expert day-to-day use of Claude, Cursor, and similar AI coding tools.

Nice to have

• Experience with data mesh, data fabric, lakehouse architectures, or governance framework implementation.
• Healthcare data modeling experience.
• AWS certifications, especially Certified Data Engineer – Associate.

Culture & Benefits

• Work remotely from Canada as part of a multidisciplinary engineering organization.
• Build production-ready AI systems designed for real enterprise workflows and measurable client impact.
• Work in a senior environment where teams average more than 15 years of experience.
• Operate with strong ownership, direct feedback, craftsmanship, resourcefulness, and continuous learning.
• Employment is subject to a background check in accordance with local legislation.