Sr. AI Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

Location: This position can be located in the following area(s): United States (remote)

Company Overview

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.

Position Overview

We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and deliver the data and AI infrastructure behind an enterprise agentic AI platform. This role is ideal for an engineer with several years of experience who can confidently own features end-to-end, contribute to architectural decisions, and bring strong technical judgment to the problems they take on.

In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team alongside AWS Professional Services, embedded with a large enterprise client. You'll help scale an observability data platform from an initial single-agent pilot to a fully automated, end-to-end operations model, establishing the agentic AI framework, along with the data pipelines, observability, and service enablement around it.” You'll be joining real, in-flight work where reliability, security, and scalability matter. You'll collaborate with experienced engineers to enhance existing systems, deliver new capabilities, and contribute to the technical decisions that shape how the platform scales over time.

Why This Role Matters

At Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate.

Every role here contributes directly to that mission. Here, you shape how AI systems integrate into enterprise operations, how teams move at real velocity, and how products create measurable impact for clients and the people they serve. We ship production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days. That pace demands people who take ownership, lead with craft, and care deeply about what they put their name on.

What You’ll Do

Craft & Delivery

• Design, implement, and deploy data and AI/ML systems on AWS end-to-end, from concept through production, including data lake pipelines, observability instrumentation, and optimization for performance, reliability, and cost
• Establish an agentic AI framework and the tooling and service enablement around it, taking agent workloads from a single-agent pilot toward a fully automated, fleet-scale operating model.
• Maintain and evolve platforms in production, monitoring for drift, debugging issues, and driving ongoing improvements to reliability and scalability
• Bring an AI-forward coding mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude and Cursor to ship higher-quality work at pace

Collaboration & Communication

• Partner closely with AWS Professional Services, client engineering, and data teams to align the work with broader platform and business goals
• Translate technical tradeoffs, system behavior, and constraints into terms non-specialists can act on
• Participate actively in code reviews and design discussions, raising concerns and offering constructive feedback

Leadership & Influence

• Contribute to data and AI architecture decisions with thoughtful perspective on tradeoffs and long-term implications
• Take ownership of meaningful work end-to-end, including the unglamorous parts of getting AI into production
• Raise the bar on engineering practices through your own work and by supporting more junior engineers when opportunities arise

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years professional software or data engineering experience, with 2+ years building data platforms and shipping AI/ML or agentic systems in production on AWS.
• Strong software engineering background (Python and SQL, or similar)
• AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate. Candidates without it are considered if there is a clear, near-term path to earning it
• Hands-on experience building data lakes on AWS, including S3, Lake Formation, Glue, Athena, and Iceberg or Parquet, with exposure to streaming on Kinesis or MSK
• Experience with observability for distributed and AI systems, including CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry/ADOT, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Grafana, and drift monitoring with SageMaker Model Monitor
• Hands-on experience with agent enablement on AWS, including Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, RAG, and Bedrock Agents, and agent frameworks such as Strands Agents or LangGraph
• Experience designing and shipping agentic AI systems in production environments
• Experience with MLOps and LLMOps practices, including evaluation, deployment, and monitoring of models and agents
• Experience with infrastructure as code using AWS CDK, and CI/CD for data and AI systems
• Understanding of IAM and KMS security, data governance, responsible AI principles, and PII handling
• Cost optimization experience across storage, query, compute, and model usage
• Experience delivering solutions in a consulting or professional services setting, working alongside client and partner teams
• Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate ambiguous technical challenges with sound judgment

Helpful Extras and Unique Skills

• Experience in regulated enterprise environments such as financial services
• Additional AWS certifications such as Machine Learning Engineer – Associate, Security – Specialty, or Solutions Architect – Professional
• Prior work with AWS Professional Services or other AWS partner delivery teams
• Open-source contributions or deep familiarity with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem

You’ll Do Well Here if You Are

• A doer. You see something broken and fix it. You'd rather move on clarity than wait for certainty.
• A fast learner who knows you don't know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You're senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway.
• Direct in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You'd rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke.
• Obsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don't put your name on work you wouldn't stand behind.
• Built for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing.
• All in. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
• Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you.
• Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work.

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is $119,514 USD - $164,899 USD. We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission. We are committed to ensuring equal employment opportunities for all job applicants and employees. Employment decisions are based upon job-related reasons regardless of an applicant's race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, marital status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other status protected by law.