Senior Data Engineer

Publicis Sapient; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 135,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Inclusive workplace

Learning opportunities

Competitive compensation

Flexible work-life balance

Health benefits

Paid leave and holidays

Wellness program

Job summary

Publicis Sapient in Chicago is seeking a Senior Data Engineer/Lead Engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable Big Data solutions across batch and streaming pipelines on cloud platforms.

You will translate client requirements into robust architectures, drive data platform modernization, and mentor junior engineers while delivering measurable business value.

This role emphasizes AI-enabled data foundations, observability, and efficient data services to support advanced analytics for clients.

Qualifications

• Lead, design, develop and deliver large-scale data systems and pipelines.
• Build batch and streaming data pipelines on cloud platforms.
• Automate data platform operations, telemetry, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Turn client requirements into end-to-end data solutions.
• Lead, design and deliver large-scale data systems and pipelines.
• Build batch and streaming data pipelines on cloud platforms and distributed processing frameworks.
• Automate data platform operations and telemetry for AI-enabled services.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to delivery.
• Provide feasibility assessments and project estimates for data solutions.

Skills

Client collaboration

Mentoring

Problem solving

Cloud data platforms

Tools

Snowflake

Vector databases

Graph databases

Semantic search

Job description

Job Description

As a Senior Data Engineer/ Lead Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable Big Data solutions. You will work with large datasets, real-time processing frameworks, and cloud-based data platforms to enable data-driven decision-making for our clients.

Job Description

As a Senior Data Engineer/ Lead Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable Big Data solutions. You will work with large datasets, real-time processing frameworks, and cloud-based data platforms to enable data-driven decision-making for our clients.

Your Impact

• Combine your technical expertise and problem-solving passion to work closely with clients, turning complex ideas into end-to-end data solutions that transform our clients’ business.
• Translate client requirements into system design and develop solutions that deliver measurable business value.
• Lead, design, develop and deliver large-scale data systems, data processing, data transformation, and data platform modernization initiatives.
• Build and optimize batch and streaming data pipelines across modern cloud data platforms and distributed processing frameworks.
• Support AI-enabled engineering use cases by designing high-quality data foundations, retrieval patterns, context engineering approaches, and scalable data services that power agentic and machine learning solutions.
• Automate data platform operations and manage post-production systems, observability, quality, reliability, and operational processes, including telemetry pipelines that capture prompt, response, trace, latency, token, and cost data for AI-enabled services in a queryable form.
• Conduct technical feasibility assessments and provide project estimates for the design and development of solutions.
• Mentor, support, and grow junior team members while contributing hands‑on to delivery.

AI Engineering & Modern Data Platform Experience

• Exposure to AI engineering patterns, including context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation support patterns, agent architectures, and production data services that support AI-enabled experiences.
• Experience building and maintaining the pipelines behind retrieval systems, including document parsing, chunking, metadata extraction, embedding generation, and incremental reindexing, alongside the vector databases, graph databases, semantic search, and knowledge retrieval structures they feed.
• Exposure to agentic platforms or cloud AI services such as Vertex AI, Azure AI services, AWS AI services, or comparable platforms; specific platform experience is less important than understanding how AI engineering differs from traditional data engineering.
• Practical experience deploying agents, integrating agent frameworks, or supporting agentic workflows in production or near-production environments is a plus.
• Experience building evaluation data infrastructure for AI systems, including ground-truth and golden datasets, offline evaluation pipelines, and the data scaffolding behind LLM-as-judge and regression testing.
• Experience modeling and persisting agent state, including session context, conversation history, and memory stores, treating them as a durable storage and data modeling problem rather than an application detail.
• Support AI-enabled engineering use cases by designing high-quality data foundations, retrieval patterns, context engineering approaches, and scalable data services that power agentic and machine learning solutions, applying the same lineage, provenance, and data contract rigor to context and retrieval sources that you would to a production warehouse.
• Experience with agentic harnesses or orchestration tools such as Pi, Hermes Agent, or similar platforms is a plus, but not required.
• Experience with Snowflake and zero-copy architecture patterns is a plus, particularly for retail, financial services, energy, or CPG-oriented use cases.

Set Yourself Apart With

• Developer certifications for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, or related cloud/data platforms.
• Demonstrated experience applying AI engineering concepts in practical business environments rather than only academic or research settings.
• Hands‑on experience supporting AI/ML and LLM lifecycle needs such as model deployment support, monitoring, validation, shadow deployments, release management, and evaluation or data quality measurement for both predictive models and generative systems.
• Experience in retail, financial services, energy, CPG, logistics, manufacturing, or other data-rich industries where applied AI and large-scale data engineering are used to solve operational or client-facing problems.
• Understanding of Agile, product, and delivery methodologies in consulting or client-facing environments.

Additional Information

Benefits of Working Here

• An inclusive workplace that promotes diversity and collaboration.
• Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package.
• Flexibility to support work-life balance.
• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family.
• Generous paid leave and holidays.
• Wellness program and employee assistance.

Pay Range: $135,000 - $165,000

The range shown represents a grouping of relevant ranges currently in use at Publicis Sapient. Actual range for this position may differ, depending on location and specific skillset required for the work itself.

As part of our dedication to an inclusive and diverse workforce, Publicis Sapient is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity without regard for race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, protected veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [e-mail]

Company Description

Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting, and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. United by our core values and our purpose of helping people thrive in the brave pursuit of next, our 20,000+ people in 53 offices around the world combine experience across technology, data sciences, consulting, and customer obsession to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value.