Founding Data Engineer
$150,000–$400,000 year
On-siteNew York City, New York, United States
Job Summary
Build end-to-end pipelines and models that transform fragmented enterprise data into AI-ready assets, defining data packs and ontologies for direct customer use. Structure noisy datasets and construct internal tooling that automates workflows, ensuring each engagement compounds rather than starting from zero. Form strong technical opinions on data models, storage, and orchestration tradeoffs, then make the call on strategy. Work directly with operators and AI engineers to turn high-value use cases into production systems. This founding role lives across the full spectrum of data engineering, data science, and ML engineering, requiring you to write the playbook for Percepta's applied AI mission in healthcare, manufacturing, and energy sectors.
Required Qualifications
- Strong experience around some combination of Data Science, Data Engineering, Machine Learning
- A product instinct for the second half of the job — you want to build the thing that makes the work easier, not just do the work
- Intuition for what modern AI/ML and LLM systems actually need from data (features, retrieval, context, embeddings)
- High ownership and strong communication — you're comfortable embedded directly with customer teams
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building agentic or automated data-engineering tooling
- Hands-on experience with modern cloud data platforms (e.g., Databricks)
- Experience with health-system data (EHR, claims, and other operational healthcare datasets) or other complex, regulated enterprise data
- Prior startup, founding, or forward-deployed experience
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