Data Engineer - 100% Remote

About the Company

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc. (SGA) is a women-owned technology and resource solutions provider that helps organizations address IT challenges through a personalized approach. The company supports consultants across a wide range of engagements and emphasizes customer service, employee development, quality, and integrity.

About the Role

SGA is seeking a Data Engineer for a remote contract assignment with a client in the infrastructure services sector. This role focuses on building and maintaining the data infrastructure that supports AI and machine learning initiatives, including model training, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and production machine learning systems.

The Data Engineer will develop pipelines for structured and unstructured data, support vector search and embedding workflows, and ensure that data used by AI systems is accurate, governed, secure, and accessible to authorized users. The role involves close collaboration with machine learning engineers and data scientists to support reliable data delivery, model evaluation, and production AI applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build pipelines to ingest, clean, and transform structured and unstructured data, including documents, PDFs, transcripts, and logs, for AI and machine learning use cases.
• Build and maintain vector embedding pipelines and support integration with vector databases.
• Develop feature stores and data pipelines for machine learning model training and inference.
• Implement data pipelines for RAG architectures, including chunking strategies, embedding refresh cycles, and metadata tagging.
• Collaborate with machine learning engineers and data scientists to understand data requirements for model training and evaluation.
• Maintain data lineage, quality, and governance across pipelines that supply AI systems.
• Optimize data pipelines for cost and performance using approaches such as Dynamic Tables and streaming ingestion.
• Support MLOps and LLMOps workflows, including dataset versioning and tracking data used in model training to support reproducibility and compliance.
• Implement data entitlement and access control logic to ensure AI systems access only authorized information.

Required Qualifications

• Strong SQL skills and proficiency in at least one of Python or Scala for data pipeline development.
• Experience working with a cloud data platform.
• Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow or dbt.
• Understanding of embedding models, vector search, and RAG patterns.
• Experience processing unstructured data.
• Familiarity with machine learning lifecycle concepts.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Snowflake Cortex, Cortex Search, or similar in-warehouse AI tools.
• Experience in a regulated industry, particularly financial services, with data entitlement and compliance requirements.
• Exposure to LLM application frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex.

Employment Type and Work Arrangement

• Employment type: Contract assignment.
• Work arrangement: Fully remote.
• Client industry: Infrastructure services.

Application and Communication Consent

By applying to SGA, candidates agree to allow the company to process their applications for the current and future opportunities in accordance with its Privacy Policy. Candidates also agree to be contacted by SGA's AI recruiter through email, text, or phone for timely application processing.

Message frequency may vary, and standard data rates may apply. Candidates can reply STOP to opt out of text messages or contact [email protected] to opt out of AI communications. Choosing not to engage with AI will not adversely affect consideration for placement. AI is not used to make hiring decisions.

Equal Employment Opportunity

SGA is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, or other legally protected status. The company is committed to providing equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities throughout employment and its services, programs, and activities. Candidates may consult SGA's company EEO page to request an accommodation or assistance regarding its policy.