Principal AI & Analytics Engineer Reporting Platform

Company: SimplifyVMS Location: Jersey City, New Jersey. Role type: Full-time, hands-on individual contributor About the role SimplifyVMS is building an AI-first platform for managing the contingent workforce. We are looking for an exceptional and passionate engineer to own the design and delivery of our next-generation reporting and analytics product that will replace our current reporting/analytics platform. We are working in a hyper speed mode and looking for someone who can fit this culture. Time is of essence in the world of AI. This is a builder role, and you will leverage tools like cursor and Claude to automate the entire software development. You will turn complex VMS data into trusted, fast, intuitive analytics for customers. The initial goal is to deliver a production-ready reporting foundation, a flexible self-service report builder, and approximately 60–70 standard reports. We want to make substantial progress within the first 60 days by using AI development tools effectively, reusing sound reporting patterns, and making focused product decisions. You will work directly with product and business stakeholders, take ownership of technical decisions, and write production code yourself. You should be comfortable moving quickly without compromising data accuracy, tenant security, or maintainability. What you will own Design the reporting architecture, including data ingestion, transformation, analytical data models, metrics, APIs, and the user-facing reporting experience. Build a self-service report builder that lets authorized users select fields and metrics, apply filters, group and sort results, create visualizations, and export reports. Deliver a catalog of approximately 60–70 standard reports by defining reusable datasets, metrics, templates, and report configurations. Translate VMS concepts—including requisitions, submissions, placements, assignments, timesheets, spend, suppliers, rates, and program performance—into consistent, documented reporting definitions. Establish strong tenant isolation and role-based access so customers see only the data they are entitled to access. Optimize report performance and data freshness for large customer datasets. Build automated tests and reconciliation checks that compare report results with source transactions and existing reports. Evaluate where existing analytics components can accelerate delivery and where a native SimplifyVMS experience is needed. Use Cursor and other AI coding tools to accelerate development while personally reviewing architecture, generated code, tests, security, and results. Demonstrate working software frequently, incorporate customer and stakeholder feedback, and own the platform through launch. First 60 days Weeks 1–2: Understand the SimplifyVMS data model and existing reports; agree on definitions for critical metrics; deliver an end-to-end report using real data with correct tenant permissions. Weeks 3–4: Establish the reporting data model and reusable metrics; deliver the first set of priority reports and a working version of the report builder. Weeks 5–8: Expand the standard report catalog, improve builder capabilities, validate results with business owners, test performance and access controls, and release an initial production version. Success will be measured by accurate, usable reports and a durable foundation for future analytics—not by generating 70 report screens that cannot be trusted. What we are looking for Significant experience building production data, analytics, or reporting products, ideally in a multi-tenant B2B SaaS environment. Number of years of experience does not matter. What matters is your ability to deliver an exceptional reporting/analytics platform that will define the future of the industry. Strong hands-on software engineering ability across backend services, SQL, data modeling, APIs, and modern web applications. Experience building configurable reporting, embedded analytics, business intelligence, or customer-facing dashboards. The ability to design reliable ingestion and transformation pipelines and make practical decisions about data freshness, scale, and cost. Deep understanding of permissions, tenant isolation, sensitive data handling, and secure query design. Experience using AI coding tools to deliver substantially faster while maintaining engineering discipline. Strong product judgment: you can turn ambiguous requests into reusable capabilities instead of one-off reports. A track record of independently taking a complex product from architecture to production. Clear communication, urgency, ownership, and comfort working directly with business stakeholders. Particularly valuable experience Contingent workforce, VMS, staffing, MSP, procurement, or HR technology data. ClickHouse, Superset, Kafka, Debezium, or comparable analytics and data pipeline technologies. Designing semantic layers, metrics catalogs, report templates, and natural-language analytics. Building analytics products on AWS and integrating them into an existing SaaS application. Why this role matters Reporting is a core product capability for SimplifyVMS. The right person will do more than produce dashboards: you will create the data and analytics foundation that helps customers understand their workforce, make better decisions, and eventually interact with their data through AI. This is an opportunity for a highly capable engineer to own a meaningful product from the start.