Data Engineer II - Scalable AI Data Pipelines

McKinsey & Company; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 146,600 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

McKinsey & Company is seeking a data engineering professional to build foundational data infrastructure powering AI applications and LLMs across cross‑functional teams in North America.

You will design scalable data pipelines, manage secure data environments, and prepare data for AI‑driven systems while collaborating with data scientists, ML engineers, and industry experts to deliver enterprise AI solutions.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of relevant professional experience building and deploying data solutions.
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data engineering and writing robust production‑grade code across environments.
• Proven experience building end‑to‑end data pipelines and platforms for Agentic AI, Generative AI, ML, or BI using Spark, dbt, LangChain.
• Foundation in system design, data storage, and reliability with Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, and data engineering tools.
• Hands‑on experience with MLOps/LLMOps, CI/CD for data workflows, LangSmith, Langfuse, and Terraform.
• Experience deploying across AWS, Azure, GCP and handling structured and unstructured data formats.
• Excellent time management in autonomous work environments.
• Commercial client‑facing or senior stakeholder management experience is beneficial.
• Experience with coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) is a plus.
• Strong communication in English and local office language(s).

Responsibilities

• Build foundational data infrastructure powering AI applications and LLMs.
• Design and maintain scalable data pipelines and secure data environments.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams and clients to develop AI systems.
• Translate hypotheses into engineered features and contribute to R&D for next‑gen AI capabilities.
• Contribute to robust data foundations for scalable, production‑ready AI systems.
• Work with Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and industry experts to deliver AI solutions.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data pipelines

Cloud platforms

Stakeholder management

Education

Degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Spark

dbt

LangChain

Terraform

Pandas

LangSmith

Job description

McKinsey & Company is seeking a data engineering professional to build foundational data infrastructure powering AI applications and LLMs across cross‑functional teams in North America.

You will design scalable data pipelines, manage secure data environments, and prepare data for AI‑driven systems while collaborating with data scientists, ML engineers, and industry experts to deliver enterprise AI solutions.