Staff Data Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote, United States

Salary: $225,000–$250,000 base annually

Company

hirify.global partners with high-growth AI and technology companies to hire specialist technical talent.

What you will do

• Own and evolve large-scale pipelines ingesting and normalizing high-volume data from hundreds of external feeds.
• Design event-driven data flows and backend services using Kafka or similar technologies.
• Build and operate APIs serving internal systems and customer-facing products.
• Work across Spark or Flink batch and streaming workloads, orchestration, data lake infrastructure, and cloud systems.
• Improve reliability, monitoring, alerting, observability, data quality, and production cost and performance.
• Partner with AI and ML engineers on agentic workflows, evaluation, telemetry, feedback loops, operational triage, and data onboarding; mentor engineers while remaining hands-on.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience with data-intensive or distributed systems at scale.
• Deep production experience with Spark, Flink, or similar large-scale processing frameworks.
• Experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, or another event-streaming platform.
• Backend engineering experience in Python, Java, or a similar language.
• Experience with Airflow or comparable workflow orchestration tools.
• Strong SQL, data modeling, and data quality fundamentals.
• Comfort working with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.
• Ability to operate at staff level while owning implementation details, with strong communication across product, engineering, operations, and support teams.
• Practical interest in AI tools and agents for improving engineering workflows and operational efficiency.

Nice to have

• Experience with Iceberg, Hive, Athena, Redshift, Snowflake, or similar data lake and warehouse technologies.
• Experience with data observability or quality tools.
• Experience with vector databases, retrieval systems, or AI agent monitoring.
• Experience with fragmented third-party data, marketplace data, search, recommendations, advertising, or other high-volume customer-facing data products.
• Startup or high-growth company experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent, full-time role with remote work from the United States.
• Join a small, senior data platform team with ownership of a broad technical surface area.
• Work on practical AI automation, high-scale data infrastructure, and backend systems supporting customer-facing products and internal workflows.
• Remain deeply hands-on while driving architecture, technical tradeoffs, and mentoring.