Staff Data Engineer (AI/ML)

Location: Remote-friendly from Bogotá, Colombia or Argentina

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs and ships AI co-workers and enterprise solutions for clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

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

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional data engineering experience leading complex data platform initiatives.
• Strong system architecture background and expertise in distributed data systems, cloud-native data platforms, and enterprise data warehousing.
• Expert proficiency in Python, Scala, and SQL.
• Strong experience with pipeline orchestration, streaming platforms, real-time processing, data modeling, transformation, governance, quality, 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 data.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentoring, stakeholder communication, problem-solving, and expert day-to-day use of AI coding tools such as Claude and Cursor.

Nice to have

• Experience with data mesh or data fabric concepts, lakehouse architectures, or governance framework implementation.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on production-ready AI systems designed for real enterprise operations and measurable client impact.
• Collaborate with senior multidisciplinary teams averaging 15+ years of experience.
• Operate in an ownership-oriented environment that values direct feedback, craftsmanship, resourcefulness, and continuous learning.
• Use modern AI assistants to improve delivery quality and speed.