Lead Data Engineer (AI/ML)

Title: Lead Data Engineer (AI/ML) 
Location: Houston, TX 77002 (ONSITE)
Duration: Direct Hire 
Work Requirements: U.S. Citizen, Holders, or Authorized to Work in the U.S. 

• Design and build reliable batch and streaming pipelines, including ingestion of industrial time-series and operational data alongside unstructured document sources.
• Establish data modeling, quality, lineage, and cataloging practices for data product development.
• Build feature pipelines and curated datasets that serve analytics, ML, and GenAI use cases.
• Productionize classical ML models following MLOps practices.
• Build GenAI applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over enterprise documents, including chunking, embeddings, vector search, prompt management, and evaluation.
• Implement guardrails, observability, and cost controls for LLM-based systems.
• Define evaluation approaches that make AI quality measurable and regressions visible.
• Build self-service tooling, reusable templates, and CI/CD pipelines so teams can ship data and AI products consistently on AWS and on-premises environments.
• Own infrastructure as code, observability, and reliability practices for the platform.
• Embed security, governance, and compliance requirements into the platform by design.
• Define and implement best practices around AI Assisted Software Development Life Cycle.
• Mentor junior engineers in design and code reviews and implementation best practices.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical lead role.
• Expert level experience in Python with solid software engineering fundamentals including testing, code reviews, branching policies, version control, design patterns, and API design.
• Experience building data products leveraging Snowflake, DBT, and Airflow.
• Experience delivering classical ML and GenAI systems to production, including MLOps practices such as model registries, pipeline automation, and monitoring.
• Deep AWS experience building data and AI platforms including S3 Tables, Glue, Athena, Lake Formation, SageMaker, Bedrock, Lambda, ECS, RDS, IAM, and VPC.
• Experience in designing and implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation along with deployment automation with CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical experience with AI-assisted software development workflows using tools such as Claude Code or Cursor to design, implement, test, and refactor code.
• Experience in structuring work for AI coding agents such as writing clear specifications, providing context, breaking tasks down, and reviewing generated output critically.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.