Overview
The Data Engineer role is similar to the Data Integration role but more Operations-focused, orchestrating deployments and ML flow, configuring data on clusters and managing model performance. This role bridges Data Engineering and MLOps, allowing data scientists to focus on experimentation while the business sees rapid, reliable predictive insight.
Location & Eligibility
This role is located onsite in Irvine, California. I prefer candidates that are local. Relocation is accepted but there are no relocation dollars available. I can only work with US Citizens or Green Card Holders for this role. Candidates with H1, OPT, EAD, F1, H4 or those not a US Citizen or Green Card Holder are not eligible.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement batch and streaming pipelines in Apache Spark running on Kubernetes and Kubeflow Pipelines to hydrate feature stores and training datasets.
- Build high throughput ETL/ELT jobs with SSIS, SSAS, and T‑SQL against MS SQL Server, applying Data Vault style modeling patterns for auditability.
- Integrate source control, build, and release automation using GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps for every pipeline component.
- Instrument pipelines with Prometheus exporters and visualize SLA, latency, and error budget metrics to enable proactive alerting.
- Create automated data quality and schema drift checks; surface anomalies to support a rapid incident response process.
- Use MLflow Tracking and Model Registry to version artifacts, parameters, and metrics for reproducible experiments and safe rollbacks.
- Work with data scientists to automate model retraining and deployment triggers within Kubeflow based on data freshness or concept drift signals.
- Develop PowerShell and .NET utilities to orchestrate job dependencies, manage secrets, and publish telemetry to Azure Monitor.
- Optimize Spark and SQL workloads through indexing, partitioning, and cluster sizing strategies, benchmarking performance in CI pipelines.
- Document lineage, ownership, and retention policies; ensure pipelines conform to PCI/SOX and internal data governance standards.
Qualifications
- At least 6 years of experience building data pipelines in Spark or equivalent.
- At least 2 years deploying workloads on Kubernetes/Kubeflow.
- At least 2 years of experience with MLflow or similar experiment‑tracking tools.
- At least 6 years of experience in T‑SQL, Python/Scala for Spark.
- At least 6 years of PowerShell/.NET scripting.
- At least 6 years of experience with GitHub, Azure DevOps, Prometheus, Grafana, and SSIS/SSAS.
- Kubernetes CKA/CKAD, Azure Data Engineer (DP‑203), or MLOps‑focused certifications (e.g., Kubeflow or MLflow) would be great to see.
- Mentor engineers on best practices in containerized data engineering and MLOps.