Data Engineer

Nous Research; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Nous Research seeks a data engineer to build and own data pipelines behind analytics and model training. You will wrangle long-horizon agentic data into structured, well-documented datasets, enabling analysis and training across the company.

You will own pipeline operations in production, choose ETL/ELT approaches, and communicate data location, lineage, and quality to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of data engineering experience building and operating production data pipelines.
• Strong fundamentals in SQL, data modeling, and practical schema design and evolution.
• Deep understanding of storage formats and database types, and when each one fits.
• A working model of the data stack: ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, cataloging, and serving.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and continuously improve data pipelines feeding analytics and model training.
• Deliver reliable internal analytics for decision making on data.
• Wrangle long-horizon agentic data into structured, well-documented datasets.

Skills

SQL fundamentals

Data modeling

Python

Shell scripting

Cloud platforms

Data quality

AI-assisted tools

Workflow orchestration

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Prefect

Job description

The role

Join Nous to build and own the data pipelines behind our analytics and model training. This role centers on long-horizon agentic data at scale, turning millions of multi-step, tool-conditioned interactions into reliable datasets the whole company can trust. Open to any time zone with meaningful overlap with US hours.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate, and continuously improve the data pipelines that feed analytics and model training.




• Deliver reliable internal analytics so teams across Nous can make decisions on their own data.




• Wrangle long-horizon agentic data into structured, well-documented datasets ready for analysis and training.




• Choose ETL/ELT approaches based on destination capabilities, reproducibility, latency, and cost, and explain the tradeoffs behind each choice.




• Own pipeline operations in production, including failures, re-runs, and backfills, and debug issues across jobs, storage, permissions, and downstream consumers.




• Design and evolve schemas, storage formats, and data models as needs change.




• Build memory-efficient processing that scales, using streaming and partitioning, and recognize when a workload has outgrown a single machine.




• Communicate clearly about data location, lineage, quality, limitations, and fitness for use to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of data engineering experience building and operating production data pipelines.




• Strong fundamentals in SQL, data modeling, and practical schema design and evolution.




• Deep understanding of storage formats and database types, and when each one fits.




• A working model of the data stack: ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, cataloging, and serving, and where responsibilities belong in each layer.




• Strong Python, plus solid shell skills for batch and storage operations.




• Hands-on cloud experience with object storage, batch compute, and identity and access management.




• Production experience with at least one workflow orchestration system such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or an in-house equivalent.




• An instinct for data quality: you ask “is the data good?" and not just “did the pipeline run?"




• Extensive use of AI-assisted development tools, with disciplined review of what those tools produce.

Preferred

• Experience working with agentic or LLM-generated data, including structured, multi-step, tool-conditioned interactions.




• Experience building data pipelines for model training.




• Experience processing datasets at the scale of millions of interactions or more.




• Background at data infrastructure, observability, or AI data companies.