AI Data Engineer: Build AI-Ready Data Pipelines (Hybrid)

Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Bethesda (MD); Hybrid; USD 129,000 - 161,000; Full time

Job summary

Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, is seeking an AI Data Engineer to build and operate the data pipelines that underpin HHMI's AI capabilities. You will own end-to-end data engineering, from ingestion through governance, enabling AI applications across labs and administration.

You will work with the Principal K&D Architect, AI Developer, and Operations Capabilities on a medallion-architecture approach, ensuring data quality, security, and scalable performance in a Databricks on

Qualifications

• Hands-on production data engineering with ownership of pipelines.
• Experience with Delta Lake medallion architecture and Databricks.
• Proficiency in PySpark, Python, SQL at scale.
• Experience building data foundations for AI use cases.
• Experience with workflow orchestration in production.
• Data quality and observability tooling.
• Governance with Unity Catalog and access controls.
• AWS IAM/S3/KMS experience on Databricks on AWS.
• Strong communication with cross-functional teams.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent + 4 years of hands-on data engineering.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI-facing data pipelines from ingestion to serving.
• Implement medallion architecture and Delta Lake tables with partitioning.
• Own the workflow-orchestration framework and retry policies.
• Implement governance patterns and access controls.
• Develop retrieval-supporting infrastructure, embeddings, and vector stores.
• Collaborate on contracts for data landing zones: schema, cadence, SLA, quality.
• Design and operate data quality checks and drift detection.
• Support AI Developer velocity with ready data for use cases.
• Contribute to and reuse reference-pattern libraries.

Skills

Data engineering

Databricks Spark

Python SQL

AI data engineering

Workflow orchestration

Data quality

Governance

AWS basics

Communication

Education & experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Delta Lake

Delta Live Tables

Unity Catalog

Databricks SQL

Airflow

Terraform

Job description

Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, is seeking an AI Data Engineer to build and operate the data pipelines that underpin HHMI's AI capabilities. You will own end-to-end data engineering, from ingestion through governance, enabling AI applications across labs and administration.

You will work with the Principal K&D Architect, AI Developer, and Operations Capabilities on a medallion-architecture approach, ensuring data quality, security, and scalable performance in a Databricks on