Senior Data Engineer, Research Delivery

Hardshell Inc.; Charlottesville (VA); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 182,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health coverage

Job summary

Hardshell Inc. is seeking an experienced data systems engineer to transform research data science into scalable production systems. You will own complex components, ensure performance, and manage handoffs between research and engineering.

You will collaborate with both teams to keep projects moving from prototype to production. The role requires extensive hands-on work with clustering, embedding-based methods, and large-scale document processing, plus strong communication and U.S. citizenship.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production data systems or data-heavy software, including taking research or data science code into production.
• Strong Python, plus experience with distributed data processing and with profiling and optimizing workloads too large for one machine.
• Hands-on experience with clustering, nearest-neighbor search, or embedding-based methods at scale.
• Experience with vector databases, RAG pipelines, or large-scale document processing.
• Experience prioritizing technical work against customer and product needs, ideally in a client-facing or enterprise setting.
• Clear written communication with both researchers and engineers.
• U.S. citizenship.

Responsibilities

• Own our most complex data science components from research prototype through production design, performance, and maintenance.
• Solve the scaling problems that come with them, such as clustering and similarity analysis across large document and embedding collections.
• Keep both teams clear on what's in progress, what's ready to ship, and what's blocked.
• Set the conventions for handing work between research and engineering, including reproducibility, testing, and documentation.

Skills

Python

Distributed processing

Profiling

Nearest-neighbor search

Vector databases

Clustering

US citizenship

Communication

Tools

RAG pipelines

Job description

The role

Our AI security researchers develop the methods behind Hardshell's detection and data hardening. The hardest of those methods use a lot of data and need an engineer who can turn research code into systems that run on customer data at scale. You'll own that handoff for our most complex data science components, from design through production. You'll attend both engineering standups and research syncs so work moves cleanly between the two teams.

What you'll do

• Own our most complex data science components from research prototype through production design, performance, and maintenance.
• Solve the scaling problems that come with them, such as clustering and similarity analysis across large document and embedding collections.
• Keep both teams clear on what's in progress, what's ready to ship, and what's blocked.
• Set the conventions for handing work between research and engineering, including reproducibility, testing, and documentation.

What you bring

• 7+ years building production data systems or data-heavy software, including taking research or data science code into production.
• Strong Python, plus experience with distributed data processing and with profiling and optimizing workloads too large for one machine.
• Hands-on experience with clustering, nearest-neighbor search, or embedding-based methods at scale.
• Experience with vector databases, RAG pipelines, or large-scale document processing.
• Experience prioritizing technical work against customer and product needs, ideally in a client-facing or enterprise setting.
• Clear written communication with both researchers and engineers.
• U.S. citizenship.

Nice to have

• Experience on an applied research team, such as an ML research group, a research lab, or a federally funded R&D program.
• Background in ML security, privacy, or data governance.
• Time as a technical lead on a data or ML team.

The details

• Location: Hybrid in Charlottesville, VA, or remote on Eastern Time.
• Compensation: Up to $165K base salary, plus equity and health coverage.
• Eligibility: U.S. citizenship is required for this role because of our federal work.