AI Data Engineer

Work Truck Solutions • Chico, CA

3d • $184,000 - $215,000 • Remote

About The Position

Work Truck Solutions is the operating system for the commercial vehicle industry, connecting OEMs, upfitters, dealerships, and fleet buyers. We are seeking a Staff AI Data Engineer to transform our data asset into valuable products for dealers, upfitters, and OEMs, such as market intelligence, demand and pricing signals, inventory recommendations, automated enrichment, and improved search and matching capabilities. This role involves delivering customer-facing results from data, building necessary data pipelines, and leveraging AI and LLMs to solve complex data challenges like unstructured spec sheets and inconsistent descriptions. The ideal candidate is excited about AI's potential, rigorous in proving its effectiveness, and honest about when simpler methods are superior.

Requirements

• 8+ years applying data science to real problems with a track record of shipping models and analyses that changed outcomes.
• Demonstrated ownership of customer-facing data products where model output was the product and its quality was visible to paying customers.
• Strong statistical foundation, including experimental design, regression, uncertainty quantification, and understanding of assumptions and their implications.
• Substantial applied modeling experience in forecasting, recommendation and ranking, gradient boosting, segmentation, entity resolution and fuzzy matching, and anomaly detection.
• Genuine rigor about evaluation, including offline metrics that predict online behavior, correct validation for temporal and grouped data, leakage awareness, and calibration.
• Product instinct, with a focus on improving customer decisions.
• Hands-on production experience applying LLMs to data problems: structured extraction, classification and enrichment, embeddings for similarity and clustering, semantic search and matching over real-world text.
• Experience building evaluation and guardrail systems for probabilistic output.
• Working command of production tradeoffs for models, including selection, structured output enforcement, context and token cost, latency, caching, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Actively curious about AI advancements and eager to apply them, coupled with the discipline to verify.
• Familiarity with agentic patterns and tool use, with a realistic view of their production readiness.
• Judgment to argue against AI when simpler methods are more effective.
• Expert SQL and strong Python, writing production code that is maintainable.
• Ability to independently design and build ingestion and ETL/ELT, including orchestration, transformation, batch and streaming patterns, and data modeling.
• Experience in a modern warehouse or lakehouse environment (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or equivalent), with awareness of cost and performance.
• Comfortable integrating messy, semi-structured, unreliable third-party sources and building reconciliation systems.
• Proficiency in version control, code review, CI/CD, and reproducible work.
• Exceptional written communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in automotive, dealership software, logistics, supply chain, fleet, or industrial B2B.
• Pricing, demand forecasting, or inventory optimization background.
• Background with catalog, taxonomy, or configuration data at scale.
• Marketplace experience, including liquidity, matching efficiency, and supply and demand balance.
• Experience building a company's first customer-facing data product.

Responsibilities

• Deliver results from our data by owning customer-facing data products end-to-end, from defining the opportunity to building, shipping, measuring, and iterating on models and analyses.
• Build the intelligence layer of the platform, including demand forecasting, pricing and market signals, inventory and configuration recommendations, and matching and ranking, focusing on areas with direct commercial impact for customers.
• Partner with product and design teams to determine how model outputs are presented to users, how errors are handled, and the level of confidence to express.
• Collaborate directly with customers and the commercial team to understand their decision-making processes and shape product development accordingly.
• Define and instrument success metrics for all shipped products to ensure their effectiveness.
• Apply LLMs to unstructured business data, including extraction from spec sheets and vehicle descriptions, classification, taxonomy mapping, enrichment, and semantic search and matching.
• Build evaluation infrastructure for AI output, including golden datasets, offline and online metrics, degradation monitoring, and fallback behaviors.
• Aggressively and critically apply AI to personal workflows and raise the practice for colleagues, making informed decisions about when generative approaches outperform classical ML or deterministic logic.
• Design and build ingestion, transformation, and feature pipelines independently to support modeling work.
• Contribute to entity resolution and normalization systems to create a trustworthy canonical record from inconsistent supplier data.
• Establish data quality, lineage, and contract standards for product data.
• Partner with data engineering on platform decisions and ensure handed-off work is maintainable.
• Set analytical and modeling rigor standards through peer review and mentor analysts and engineers.
• Write clearly to ensure findings influence decisions and systems are maintainable.
• Influence without authority across product, engineering, and commercial teams.
• Scope vague business questions into tractable work.
• Embrace a bias toward shipping and learning, with the discipline to follow through past launch.

Benefits

• Remote Flexibility: Work from anywhere in the U.S.
• Impactful Work: Contribute to products reshaping the commercial vehicle industry.
• Growth Opportunities: Ample opportunities for professional development in a rapidly growing company.
• Inclusive Culture: A team that values diversity, creativity, and innovation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior