Senior AI Data Engineer
Scribd, Inc.•Vancouver, BC
•Hybrid
About The Position
Scribd, Inc. is looking for a Senior AI Data Engineer to lead AI engineering workstreams on the Data Platform team. This role involves building data infrastructure for AI use cases, supporting stakeholders in shipping data products with AI, and accelerating the team's development through AI tooling. The Data Platform team is responsible for the data infrastructure, governance, and enablement that powers the company, owning foundational layers from Medallion Architecture and Unity Catalog in Databricks to semantic and AI layers. This is a high-impact role central to Scribd's AI adoption efforts, requiring a fast-paced, standard-setting approach to making data accessible and useful.
Requirements
- 5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 1 year focused on AI/ML infrastructure or LLM-powered applications.
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL; comfort working across the full data stack from ingestion to serving.
- Hands-on experience with Databricks and cloud data platforms (Unity Catalog experience a strong plus).
- Experience building or integrating NLP/LLM-based systems (RAG pipelines, semantic search, agent frameworks, or natural language interfaces).
- Working knowledge of how modern LLMs are trained, aligned, and evaluated (RLHF, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval patterns) and the judgment to know when each approach is the right tool.
- A solid understanding of data governance, access control, and building on top of trusted data.
- A security-first mindset when building AI surfaces, including secret management, encryption at rest and in transit, and responsible handling of sensitive and PII data across AI pipelines and workflows.
- The ability to work autonomously on ambiguous problems and drive them to production.
- Strong communication skills; ability to explain complex systems to technical and non-technical audiences.
Nice To Haves
- Familiarity with metrics-as-code frameworks or semantic layer tooling (e.g., Statsig, dbt Semantic Layer).
- Prior experience in a platform or infrastructure team serving internal stakeholders.
- Experience evaluating AI model outputs, including building eval harnesses, defining quality metrics, and catching regressions before they reach production.
- Working knowledge of terraform, or strong systems thinking to reason confidently about infrastructure changes without necessarily owning the code.
Responsibilities
- Own the deployment path for Databricks Apps, creating infrastructure and guardrails for safe and consistent production deployment of AI applications by non-technical users.
- Build the AI layer on top of Scribd's Medallion Architecture and Semantic Layer, connecting AI agents and workflows to governed data, and enabling self-service answers for non-technical users.
- Build AI skills and agents on top of existing declarative tooling to provide interfaces for platform stakeholders to ship pipelines faster without deep stack expertise.
- Partner with cross-organizational teams to identify AI tools, frameworks, and agentic patterns that accelerate data product development and AI adoption.
- Identify and embed AI tools into the Data Platform team's workflow for writing, testing, and shipping code, making AI-assisted development a standard practice.
- Establish guardrails to ensure AI-generated code, queries, and pipelines are correct, consistent, and production-ready.
- Help define and evolve data modeling and metadata patterns to support AI use cases (e.g., context, documentation, discoverability).
- Mentor other engineers and help define best practices for AI data engineering at Scribd.
Benefits
- Scribd Flex (flexible work model)
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
- Mental health support and disability coverage
- Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick time, holidays, winter break, volunteer time, and sabbaticals
- Paid parental leave and family support benefits
- Retirement matching and employee equity
- Learning and development programs and professional growth opportunities
- Wellness and home office stipends
- Complimentary access to the Scribd, Inc. suite of products
- Enterprise access to leading AI tools
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
