Senior Data Engineer - Lakehouse & AI Pipelines

Vulcan Elements; North Carolina; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Vulcan Elements is building a team of ambitious professionals in Durham, NC, with plans to move to Benson, NC for a new facility. The Data Engineer will design and implement data infrastructure, from operational stores through ETL pipelines to analytics and AI layers, ensuring scalable, compliant data flows across manufacturing and lab systems.

Responsibilities include platform evaluation, data modeling, and building reliable ingestion paths.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, data infrastructure, or a closely related technical role with a track record of owning and delivering production systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building data lakes, Lakehouses, or analytical data stores; understands platform tradeoffs and can defend platform choices.
• Strong experience designing and building ETL/ELT pipelines that enrich and contextualize data.
• Deep fluency with data modeling for both operational and analytical workloads; can design schemas for present and future needs.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or similar); writes and debugs SQL confidently.
• Able to work in a fast-moving environment with a small team and document decisions clearly for future colleagues.
• Must be a U.S. Person due to access to U.S. export-controlled information or facilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and own Vulcan’s data architecture from operational data stores through ETL pipelines to analytics and AI layers.
• Evaluate and select platforms for a data lakehouse, ETL tooling, and operational databases, balancing scalability and cost.
• Review, refine, and implement data architecture documents with clear reasoning; ensure compliance with CUI and ITAR data handling.
• Document key platform decisions so future teammates can build on them.
• Scale architecture from pilot plant to full-scale facility without major redesigns.
• Apply engineering practices: version control, testing, observability, and documentation as the team grows.
• Design and build ETL pipelines that move data into the data lakehouse with full contextual enrichment for analytics/AI.
• Build reliable ingest paths for structured, time-series data, files, images, and lab/manufacturing outputs.
• Collaborate with engineering, operations, and IT to translate data flows into pipelines and architecture.
• Identify and eliminate manual workflows; monitor pipelines for early issue surface.
• Diagnose data quality issues and build monitoring into pipelines.

Skills

Data engineering

ETL/ELT pipelines

Data lakes/Lakehouse

SQL databases

Data modeling

Stakeholder comms

US Person

Python

Tools

Airflow

dbt

SQL

Delta Lake

Apache Iceberg

InfluxDB

TimescaleDB

Job description

Vulcan Elements is building a team of ambitious professionals in Durham, NC, with plans to move to Benson, NC for a new facility. The Data Engineer will design and implement data infrastructure, from operational stores through ETL pipelines to analytics and AI layers, ensuring scalable, compliant data flows across manufacturing and lab systems.

Responsibilities include platform evaluation, data modeling, and building reliable ingestion paths.