Data Engineer, AI
Focused•Chicago, IL
•$145,000 - $175,000•Hybrid
About The Position
Focused is seeking a Data Engineer to build the data foundation for an enterprise AI platform serving a global enterprise client. The role focuses on making clean, governed data available for retrieval by AI agents and LLM applications. Most work will be performed in Databricks, with an emphasis on AI use cases. The position requires working in the Chicago office three days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of experience in data engineering.
- Strong hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL.
- Experience building production data pipelines in a cloud environment; Azure or GCP preferred.
- Experience with data modeling and data quality practices.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building data pipelines for RAG, embeddings, or vector search.
- Experience with Unity Catalog and Mosaic AI.
- Experience with streaming technologies such as Structured Streaming, Kafka, or Event Hubs.
- Consulting or client-facing experience.
- Experience improving an AI system's answers by fixing underlying data.
- Experience handling messy unstructured data at scale.
- Databricks certifications or open-source contributions.
Responsibilities
- Design and build batch and streaming pipelines in Databricks using Spark, Delta Lake, and Workflows.
- Model data in a lakehouse architecture that supports analytics and AI workloads.
- Implement governance and access controls using Unity Catalog.
- Monitor data quality and pipeline reliability.
- Build ingestion and chunking pipelines for unstructured data, including documents, PDFs, and knowledge bases, to feed RAG systems.
- Generate, store, and refresh embeddings, and operate vector search using Databricks Vector Search or similar tools.
- Build datasets for LLM evaluation and help teams measure retrieval quality.
- Partner with AI and platform engineers to ensure agents have the appropriate data and permissions.
- Deploy data infrastructure on Azure and/or GCP using infrastructure as code.
- Apply software engineering practices to data work, including version control, testing, and CI/CD.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
