Principal AI Data Engineer - Remote/Hybrid Leadership

Philip Morris International; United States; Remote; USD 75,000 - 91,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Life and Health insurance

Employee Pension Plan

26 holiday days

National and international growth

Job summary

Ocupacao is seeking a principal data engineering leader to define standards for reusable AI data and grounding capabilities. You will guide data sources, schemas, and governance while ensuring secure, scalable, and observable data foundations across multiple remote locations.

You will review pipelines, assess freshness and latency, and turn incidents into improved patterns. This role combines technical leadership with collaboration across engineering and data teams in a global, remote-friendly

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, IT, or software engineering.
• Enterprise software engineering in cloud-native distributed systems.
• Hands-on enterprise AI data engineering, grounding and retrieval experience.
• Knowledge of data pipelines, contracts, schemas, lineage, provenance, metadata and quality controls.
• Experience with ingestion, indexing, chunking, embedding, retrieval and refresh patterns.
• Ability to assess relevance, freshness, scalability, latency, cost and access-control trade-offs.
• Experience with batch and streaming architectures, observability and recoverability.
• Strong secure software development, CI/CD, testing and production-readiness foundations.
• Proven technical leadership through standards, reviews, supplier assurance and remediation.
• Strong communication, cross-team influence, mentoring and documentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Define standards for data contracts, ingestion, transformation, indexing, grounding and refresh patterns.
• Review supplier pipelines, code, schemas, retrieval configurations, lineage and quality evidence.
• Assess source suitability, freshness, retrieval relevance and downstream AI behavior.
• Set expectations for permissions, access controls, retention and deletion across sources, indexes and caches.
• Partner with Quality and Testing to assess completeness, validity, provenance and reproducibility.
• Review readiness for schema changes, refresh failures, recoverability and operational handover.
• Turn findings and incidents into improved standards, guidance and reference patterns.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

Cloud-native distributed systems

Data pipelines and schemas

Data grounding and retrieval

CI/CD and production-readiness

Strong communication

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Security and provenance tooling

Job description

Ocupacao is seeking a principal data engineering leader to define standards for reusable AI data and grounding capabilities. You will guide data sources, schemas, and governance while ensuring secure, scalable, and observable data foundations across multiple remote locations.

You will review pipelines, assess freshness and latency, and turn incidents into improved patterns. This role combines technical leadership with collaboration across engineering and data teams in a global, remote-friendly