Staff ML Data Engineer — Frontier Models & Data Pipelines

Icehouseventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 227,000 - 313,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Bonus incentive

Hybrid on-site in San Francisco

Job summary

Procore’s AI & Frontier Models team is seeking a Staff ML Data Engineer to design and build data systems that empower frontier-scale research and AI products, with emphasis on spatial intelligence and multimodal data.

You'll work closely with ML researchers and system architects to transform research needs into scalable, production-ready pipelines, while mentoring engineers and setting engineering standards in a hybrid, onsite‑3days/week role in our San Francisco office.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 8+ years of experience designing and operating complex data systems in production or research-adjacent environments.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python; experience with data-intensive or distributed systems.
• Proven experience building scalable data pipelines that support machine learning training, evaluation, or inference workflows.
• Solid understanding of data modeling, dataset lifecycle management, and data quality best practices.
• Comfort operating in highly ambiguous problem spaces and collaborating closely with researchers and architects.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through direct technical contribution, mentorship, and setting engineering standards.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to both research and engineering audiences.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical lead for data engineering efforts supporting frontier model research and applied ML systems.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable batch and streaming pipelines for multimodal data (e.g., documents, images, spatial metadata).
• Partner closely with researchers and architects to translate experimental workflows into reliable, repeatable data systems.
• Lead the development of dataset curation, versioning, and lineage workflows that support rapid experimentation and reproducibility.
• Establish and uphold standards for data quality, validation, observability, and cost efficiency across AI data pipelines.
• Contribute to data architecture decisions spanning research environments and production systems.
• Identify gaps or inefficiencies in existing data workflows and run proofs-of-concept to evaluate improvements.
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Data modeling

Mentorship

Communication

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Job description

Procore’s AI & Frontier Models team is seeking a Staff ML Data Engineer to design and build data systems that empower frontier-scale research and AI products, with emphasis on spatial intelligence and multimodal data.

You'll work closely with ML researchers and system architects to transform research needs into scalable, production-ready pipelines, while mentoring engineers and setting engineering standards in a hybrid, onsite‑3days/week role in our San Francisco office.