Forward Deployed Engineer, Data De-Identification

Tonic.ai; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tonic AI is seeking an engineer to own delivery of client de-identification projects—from initial data review to a dataset the client accepts. You will run corpora through our de-identification pipeline, ensure accuracy, and coordinate with annotation teams.

You'll diagnose issues, implement fixes, rebuild outputs, and help craft reusable runbooks and documentation while collaborating with founders, data science, and platform engineers to ship reliable, ready-to-use datasets.

Responsibilities

• Own the delivery of client de-identification projects, from the first look at the raw data to a dataset the client accepts.
• Run each corpus through our de-identification pipeline and check the output for accuracy: missed entities, wrong replacements, identities merged or split incorrectly, files that won't rebuild.
• Diagnose problems as they appear. Where you can, fix them for the whole solution or for the one case. Where you can't, understand the issue well enough to explain it clearly to the engineer who can.
• Rerun the pipeline, confirm the fix worked, then move on to the next step, which often includes working with our annotation team to validate quality.
• Build and adjust the ingestion and transformation steps that turn raw exports (mailboxes, chat archives, document dumps, ticketing systems, databases) into processed, ready-to-use datasets.
• Write code that gets merged, within the guardrails of our existing platform, including custom handling for client-specific one-offs.
• Run reconciliation checks so file counts and content tie from ingest to delivery.
• Contribute to the technical sections of the client report: what was treated as sensitive, what was kept and why, how each file type was handled, and known limitations.
• Walk clients through what was done and the resulting data, alongside Tonic's founders at first and on your own as you grow.
• Turn every one-off fix into something reusable: documentation, runbooks, and improvements to the product.

Job description

About Tonic.ai

Tonic.ai has been de-identifying sensitive data since 2018, and hundreds of enterprises use our products, among them eBay, UnitedHealth Group, Qualcomm, Commonwealth Bank, and Mercor. Our newest line of business takes that work somewhere it hasn't gone before: company operating data. Email, chat, tickets, documents, code, CRM and HR records are some of the most valuable training data left for AI labs, and almost none of it can change hands until the people in it are protected.

We sit between the company that owns the data and the lab that wants it, as the independent third party. We take in the corpus, find the people and organizations referenced across all of those systems, give each real identity one consistent synthetic replacement, rebuild every file in its original format, and deliver the result with a written report on how it was done. The data still reads like a company doing its work, which is what makes it worth training on.

Why this role, why now

Demand is running ahead of our capacity to deliver. Labs are buying, data owners are selling, and the buyers want datasets in days to weeks, not quarters. The technology can meet that timeline. What turns it into a delivered dataset is an engineer who can take a messy, half-documented corpus from a new client, get it through the pipeline, catch what breaks, and ship something both sides will sign off on.

That's this job. You’ll be one of the first engineers dedicated to this business, working directly with our technical founders, data science team and platform engineers, and getting close to the frontier AI labs that are the end buyers of this data.

What you'll do

• Own the delivery of client de-identification projects, from the first look at the raw data to a dataset the client accepts.

• Run each corpus through our de-identification pipeline and check the output for accuracy: missed entities, wrong replacements, identities merged or split incorrectly, files that won't rebuild.

• Diagnose problems as they appear. Where you can, fix them for the whole solution or for the one case. Where you can't, understand the issue well enough to explain it clearly to the engineer who can.

• Rerun the pipeline, confirm the fix worked, then move on to the next step, which often includes working with our annotation team to validate quality.

• Build and adjust the ingestion and transformation steps that turn raw exports (mailboxes, chat archives, document dumps, ticketing systems, databases) into processed, ready-to-use datasets.

• Write code that gets merged, within the guardrails of our existing platform, including custom handling for client-specific one-offs.

• Run reconciliation checks so file counts and content tie from ingest to delivery.

• Contribute to the technical sections of the client report: what was treated as sensitive, what was kept and why, how each file type was handled, and known limitations.

• Walk clients through what was done and the resulting data, alongside Tonic's founders at first and on your own as you grow.

• Turn every one-off fix into something reusable: documentation, runbooks, and improvements to the product.