Forward Deployed Engineer, Data De-Identification (Co-op)

Tonic.ai; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 34,000 - 55,000; Part time

Job summary

Tonic.ai in San Francisco is seeking a co-op data/ backend engineer for approximately 20 hours per week. You will work on de-identification data pipelines, ingestion, and dataset preparation while collaborating with founders, data science, and platform engineers.

This role emphasizes reliability, code quality, and measurable impact on client engagements. You should have a technical degree or be enrolled in one, strong Python and SQL skills, and a track record of delivering projects with limited

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or current enrollment in one.
• Hands-on data engineering or backend engineering work shipping production systems.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, and ability to read and debug others' code.
• Experience building repeatable pipelines processing large data volumes.
• AI-native workflow awareness; can validate AI outputs and provide oversight.
• Self-directed with the ability to work with minimal supervision.
• Clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Track record delivering complex projects on tight timelines; ~20 hours/week availability.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of client de-identification projects from ingestion to delivery.
• Run corpora through the de-identification pipeline and verify output accuracy.
• Diagnose issues and fix them or clearly explain to an engineer for fixes.
• Rerun pipelines after fixes and coordinate with annotation team for quality.
• Build and adjust ingestion/transformation steps for datasets.
• Write code to merge, within platform guardrails, including client-specific cases.
• Run reconciliation checks tying ingest to delivered data.
• Contribute to client reports explaining sensitive handling and limitations.
• Walk clients through results with founders and grow into responsibilities.
• Turn fixes into reusable documentation and runbooks.

Skills

Python

SQL

Backend engineering

AI workflows

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical field

Job description

Remote · Co-op, about 20 hours a week · Current students welcome

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.

This is a co-op role at roughly 20 hours a week. We welcome current students alongside experienced engineers looking for part-time work.

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.

What We're Looking For

• A bachelor's degree in a technical field (computer science, engineering, math, statistics, physics, bioinformatics, or similar), or currently enrolled in one.

• Hands‑on work in data engineering, backend engineering, or a solutions/forward‑deployed role where you shipped production systems for customers. Internships, co‑ops, research, and substantial projects count.

• Strong experience in Python and other backend programming languages, plus SQL. Comfortable reading and debugging other people's code.

• Experience building repeatable pipelines that process large volumes of structured, semi‑structured, and unstructured data. You understand how data flows through a system and can tell when output is wrong.

• AI‑native workflow. AI tools and agents are central to how you work, not an add‑on. You know where they're reliable, where they need your oversight, and you don't trust their output without checking it.

• Self‑direction. You'll often be the only engineer on an engagement, and you'll need to make sound calls without waiting for someone to tell you what to do.

• Clear communication with very different audiences. You can walk a client's engineer through a pipeline failure in the morning and explain a tradeoff to a senior executive in the afternoon.

• A record of delivering complex projects on short timelines, measured in days and weeks.

• Availability for roughly 20 hours a week, with enough flexibility to keep client engagements on schedule.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with model inference, ML pipelines, or PyTorch.

• Experience building or maintaining data masking, de-identification, ETL or synthetic data tooling.

• Interest in working close to frontier AI labs and the training‑data ecosystem.

• Experience at an early‑stage company or on a new product line.

What Success Looks Like

In your first month, you'll learn the platform and the delivery process and run part of a live engagement alongside the team. By the end of your first quarter, you'll be running engagements on your own, from scoping to delivery, and the runbooks and tooling you've written will have made the second and third ones faster than the first. After that, you'll help shape how this function grows.

Why Join

• You'll be early in a fast‑growing business solving a problem the AI industry doesn't yet have a good answer for.

• You'll work alongside technical founders, with a direct line from what you see in the field to what gets built.

• You'll get close to the frontier AI labs and build experience at the center of the training‑data market.

• The work matters beyond any one deal: getting company data to labs without exposing the people in it is a problem the whole industry has to solve.

• Competitive compensation.

Tonic.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We're building a team that reflects the diversity of our users and the problems they're trying to solve.