Junior AI Data Engineer - Build AI-Driven Data Pipelines

Cortica; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 80,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) plan with company matching

Paid holidays and wellness days

Life insurance

Disability insurance options

Tuition reimbursement for professional

Referral bonuses

Job summary

Cortica is seeking a Junior AI Data Engineer in San Diego to learn data engineering while building AI-first habits from day one. You will work under senior engineers to contribute to data pipelines, models, and reporting powering care decisions, financial planning, and operations.

Collaborate with data science, finance, and clinical operations, using AI tooling responsibly and documenting work for production quality. Some travel to Cortica centers may be required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/IS/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• 0–2 years of experience; 1–2 end-to-end data pipelines built ingesting, transforming, and loading data.
• Familiar with AI coding assistants and eager to adopt AI-first workflows.
• 6+ months of Python experience; can read, clean, and transform data with pandas.
• Intermediate SQL: joins, GROUP BY, filtering, and basic subqueries.
• Exposure to AWS or Azure; cloud fundamentals cert a plus.
• Experience building dashboards in Power BI/Tableau is a plus.
• Ability to document work clearly and collaborate across at least 2 teams.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to well-scoped data engineering tasks within larger projects under guidance.
• Use AI coding assistants responsibly and verify AI-generated code.
• Follow project conventions to keep AI work consistent with patterns.
• Help build and maintain data pipelines ingesting from AWS/Azure/Salesforce/MuleSoft into AWS Data Lake.
• Assist in implementing data models using Kimball dimensional modeling on the job.
• Develop simple Python orchestration steps and perform basic data quality checks.
• Support Power BI data models and respond to analytics questions.
• Document work clearly; assist with small automation scripts and internal tooling.
• Follow HIPAA practices and collaborate across IT, finance, clinical operations, and data science.
• Travel to local Cortica centers may be required.

Skills

Python programming

SQL querying

Power BI

Data pipelines

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS / IS / Engineering / Math

Tools

AWS

Azure

GitHub Copilot

Claude Code / Cursor

Job description

Cortica is seeking a Junior AI Data Engineer in San Diego to learn data engineering while building AI-first habits from day one. You will work under senior engineers to contribute to data pipelines, models, and reporting powering care decisions, financial planning, and operations.

Collaborate with data science, finance, and clinical operations, using AI tooling responsibly and documenting work for production quality. Some travel to Cortica centers may be required.