Senior Data Engineer (AI-Native) — Data Layer

protonai; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

protonai is seeking a senior data engineer to own the data foundation across products and AI features. You will oversee ingestion, transformation, and serving layers, ensuring reliable data for downstream teams, with hands-on architecture and production ownership.

You will collaborate with backend, AI, product, and customer IT teams to define robust data contracts, validate data quality, and drive platform evolution. This role offers remote work with overlap across time zones.

Qualifications

• Seven+ years of hands-on data engineering with production pipelines and models serving real users at scale.
• Strong programming and SQL skills, including data modeling for analytical and transactional use cases.
• Experience building orchestrated ingestion or ELT pipelines from messy upstream sources, using a cloud warehouse and major cloud platform.
• Practical experience with file, event or streaming, and API sources.
• Ability to diagnose query and pipeline performance issues and trace data correctness problems to their cause.
• Understanding of partial loads, late or out-of-order data, schema drift, idempotency, and backfills.
• Daily experience using agentic coding tools to deliver work, with the judgment to verify results and explain technical decisions.
• Clear communication and English proficiency at C1 or above.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate ingestion from files, events, and APIs, along with raw, refined, and curated data layers and the serving layer.
• Build and maintain reliable ingestion and transformation workflows using orchestration tools and a cloud data warehouse.
• Reconcile inconsistent source data and establish validation, lineage, backfill, incremental-load, and idempotency practices.
• Improve the data platform's architecture, tooling, scale, and source coverage.
• Use coding agents to plan and implement work, review their output, and ensure production quality.
• Partner with backend, AI, product, and sometimes customer IT teams to define dependable data contracts.

Skills

Programming

SQL

Data modeling

ELT pipelines

Cloud data warehouse

Ingestion workflows

Streaming data

API sources

Data quality debugging

English communication

Job description

Role overview

Own the data foundation behind a suite of products and AI features, from incoming source data through transformation and serving. This is a hands-on senior role combining data architecture, production pipeline ownership, and active use of AI coding agents, with responsibility for making the resulting data reliable for downstream teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate ingestion from files, events, and APIs, along with raw, refined, and curated data layers and the serving layer.
• Build and maintain reliable ingestion and transformation workflows using orchestration tools and a cloud data warehouse.
• Reconcile inconsistent source data and establish validation, lineage, backfill, incremental-load, and idempotency practices.
• Improve the data platform's architecture, tooling, scale, and source coverage.
• Use coding agents to plan and implement work, review their output, and ensure production quality.
• Partner with backend, AI, product, and sometimes customer IT teams to define dependable data contracts.

Requirements

• Seven or more years of hands-on data engineering, with production ownership of pipelines and models serving real users at scale.
• Strong programming and SQL skills, including data modeling for analytical and transactional use cases.
• Experience building orchestrated ingestion or ELT pipelines from messy upstream sources, using a cloud warehouse and major cloud platform.
• Practical experience with file, event or streaming, and API sources.
• Ability to diagnose query and pipeline performance issues and trace data correctness problems to their cause.
• Understanding of partial loads, late or out-of-order data, schema drift, idempotency, and backfills.
• Daily experience using agentic coding tools to deliver work, with the judgment to verify results and explain technical decisions.
• Clear communication and English proficiency at C1 or above.

Nice to have

• Experience with modern transformation tools, streaming at scale, or medallion and lakehouse architectures.
• Work integrating enterprise ERP or ecommerce systems and reconciling transactional data.
• Experience supporting AI or machine learning products through serving layers, retrieval, or model data contracts.
• Background at an early-stage software company.

Benefits and work setup

• Remote within Europe, with meaningful daytime overlap with a team based in Boston.