Forward Deployed Data Engineer

Mecka • New York, NY

1d • $180,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Mecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI. We partner with leading AI labs and robotics companies to deliver high-quality, real-world datasets used to train, evaluate, and deploy robotic systems — where model performance is dictated by data quality.

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Data Engineer to operate on the frontier with customers: analyze messy, real-world data, turn it into beautiful, reliable datasets, and own the technical relationship end-to-end. This is a senior, high-trust role with significant autonomy. You’ll combine data engineering, analytics, and product judgment to deliver outcomes customers can ship on.

Requirements

• 7+ years in data engineering and/or backend engineering (or equivalent impact).
• Strong experience with large data systems, pipelines, and analytical workflows.
• Strong SQL proficiency and comfort across multiple database/storage paradigms.
• Excellent engineering judgment and debugging ability in production systems.

Nice To Haves

• You’ve owned high-stakes customer deliveries with autonomy and trust.
• You can translate ambiguous requirements into crisp dataset specs and execution plans.
• You have strong product instincts and care about polish: “would I trust this dataset?”

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery of customer datasets: requirements → validation → iteration → final handoff.
• Be the technical point of contact: communicate clearly, set expectations, and close loops.
• Turn customer needs into durable internal improvements (tooling, pipelines, standards).
• Build and debug data pipelines across ingestion, transformation, QA, and export.
• Work across storage and database types (SQL + NoSQL + object storage) and choose the right tool for the job.
• Create reliable dataset “contracts”: schemas, versioning, provenance, and reproducible builds.
• Analyze data distributions, identify gaps, and recommend what to collect/fix next.
• Build quality checks and acceptance criteria (coverage, consistency, integrity, edge cases).
• Deliver datasets that are clean, documented, and usable by research and engineering teams immediately.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed