Senior Data Engineer (AI)

Location: United States (remote)

Salary: $119,514–$164,899 USD per year

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that builds AI co-workers and enterprise systems for clients across multiple industries, using AWS, user experience, and senior engineering expertise.

What you will do

• Design, build, deploy, and optimize AWS data and AI/ML systems, including data lake pipelines and observability instrumentation.
• Scale an observability data platform from a single-agent pilot to an automated end-to-end operations model.
• Maintain production platforms, monitor drift, debug incidents, and improve reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with AWS Professional Services, client engineers, and data teams on platform and business goals.
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, design discussions, and engineering standards.
• Own features end-to-end and support less experienced engineers when appropriate.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including 2+ years building production data platforms or AI/ML systems on AWS.
• Strong software engineering skills with Python and SQL or similar technologies.
• AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate, or a clear near-term path to earning the certification.
• Hands-on experience with AWS data lakes using S3, Lake Formation, Glue, Athena, Iceberg or Parquet, and streaming with Kinesis or MSK.
• Experience with distributed and AI-system observability, MLOps, LLMOps, infrastructure as code with AWS CDK, and CI/CD.
• Knowledge of Amazon Bedrock, RAG, Bedrock Agents, IAM, KMS, data governance, responsible AI, PII handling, and cost optimization.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated enterprise environments such as financial services.
• Additional AWS certifications, including Machine Learning Engineer, Security, or Solutions Architect.
• Experience with AWS Professional Services, AWS partner delivery teams, Strands Agents, LangGraph, or OpenTelemetry.
• Open-source contributions or deep familiarity with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

Culture & Benefits

• Ownership-oriented environment focused on shipping production-ready AI systems quickly.
• Direct collaboration with experienced engineers, AWS Professional Services, and enterprise clients.
• Paid time off and medical, dental, and vision insurance for eligible employees.
• 401(k) benefits for eligible employees.
• Work that combines engineering, creativity, and measurable client impact.