Data Engineer - Remote

About the Company

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc. (SGA), is a women-owned technology and resource solutions provider that connects consultants with client engagements. The company focuses on customer service, employee development, quality, and integrity, taking a personal approach to solving IT challenges.

About the Role

SGA is seeking a Data Engineer for a remote contract assignment with one of its infrastructure services clients. The role focuses on building and maintaining the data infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence 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 database integration, and help ensure that AI systems have access to high-quality, well-governed data. Working closely with machine learning engineers and data scientists, the successful candidate will contribute to data processing, model development workflows, and production AI applications while maintaining data quality, security, lineage, and compliance.

Key Responsibilities

•Design and build pipelines to ingest, clean, and transform structured and unstructured data, including documents, PDFs, transcripts, and logs, for AI/ML use cases.

•Build and maintain vector embedding pipelines and support vector database integration.

•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 ML engineers and data scientists to understand data requirements for model training and evaluation.

•Maintain data lineage, quality, and governance across pipelines that feed AI systems.

•Optimize data pipelines for cost and performance, including the use of Dynamic Tables and streaming ingestion.

•Support MLOps and LLMOps workflows by versioning datasets and tracking training data to support reproducibility and compliance.

•Implement data entitlement and access control logic to ensure AI systems access only authorized data.

Required Qualifications

•Strong SQL skills and proficiency in at least one of Python or Scala for pipeline development.

•Experience working with a cloud data platform.

•Experience with data orchestration tools such as Airflow or dbt.

•Understanding of embedding models, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation (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 large language model (LLM) application frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex.

Salary & Benefits

Compensation and benefits details were not specified in the provided job description.

Application Privacy and AI Communication Notice

By applying to SGA, candidates agree to the processing of their application for the current and future opportunities in accordance with the company's Privacy Policy. Candidates also agree to be contacted by SGA's AI recruiter via email, text, or phone. Message frequency varies, and 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 Opportunity Employer

SGA is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of 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 access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment and in its services, programs, and activities. Candidates can visit the company's EEO page to request an accommodation or assistance regarding its policy.