Sr. AI Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer at an applied AI engineering firm, embedded with a large enterprise client alongside AWS Professional Services. Day to day, you design, build, and run data lake pipelines, observability, and agent-enablement tooling on AWS for an agentic AI platform, owning features end to end through production.
- Compensation
- $119.5K–$164.9K / yr
- Location
- US - Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 2+ years
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years professional software or data engineering experience
- 2+ years building data platforms or AI/ML systems in production on AWS
- Strong software engineering background (Python and SQL, or similar)
- AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (or clear near-term path to earning it)
- Hands-on experience building data lakes on AWS (S3, Lake Formation, Glue, Athena, Iceberg or Parquet) with exposure to streaming on Kinesis or MSK
- Experience with observability for distributed and AI systems (CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry/ADOT, Managed Prometheus/Grafana, SageMaker Model Monitor)
- Working knowledge of agent enablement on AWS (Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, RAG patterns, Bedrock Agents)
- Experience shipping agentic or ML systems in production environments
- Experience with MLOps and LLMOps practices, including evaluation, deployment, and monitoring
- Experience with infrastructure as code using AWS CDK, and CI/CD for data and AI systems
- Understanding of IAM and KMS security, data governance, responsible AI principles, and PII handling
- Cost optimization experience across storage, query, compute, and model usage
- Experience delivering solutions in a consulting or professional services setting
- Day-to-day usage of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to navigate ambiguous technical challenges
Nice to have
- Experience in regulated enterprise environments such as financial services
- Additional AWS certifications (Machine Learning Engineer – Associate, Security – Specialty, Solutions Architect – Professional)
- Prior work with AWS Professional Services or other AWS partner delivery teams
- Experience with agent frameworks and orchestration tools such as Strands Agents or LangGraph
- Open-source contributions or deep familiarity with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem
Full description
Senior Data Engineer
Location: This position can be located in the following area(s): United States (remote)
Company Overview
Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.
Position Overview
We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and deliver the data and AI infrastructure behind an enterprise agentic AI platform. This role is ideal for an engineer with several years of experience who can confidently own features end-to-end, contribute to architectural decisions, and bring strong technical judgment to the problems they take on.
In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team alongside AWS Professional Services, embedded with a large enterprise client. You'll help scale an observability data platform from an initial single-agent pilot to a fully automated, end-to-end operations model, establishing the agentic AI framework, along with the data pipelines, observability, and service enablement around it.” You'll be joining real, in-flight work where reliability, security, and scalability matter. You'll collaborate with experienced engineers to enhance existing systems, deliver new capabilities, and contribute to the technical decisions that shape how the platform scales over time.
Why This Role Matters
At Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate.
Every role here contributes directly to that mission. Here, you shape how AI systems integrate into enterprise operations, how teams move at real velocity, and how products create measurable impact for clients and the people they serve. We ship production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days. That pace demands people who take ownership, lead with craft, and care deeply about what they put their name on.