Senior Data/AI Engineer
Upstart 13Calling All Upstarters!
SENIOR DATA/AI ENGINEER WANTED!
We are Upstart 13. We are humble, hungry, and competent people who are radically changing the expectations and experience of outsourcing for all participants by challenging barriers that create inequality and by bringing down borders in technology for people everywhere. We’re all about delivering value and doing big things. We have become a game changer for teams around the world who look to Upstart’s services as a differentiator.
Job Description:
We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Engineer in Latin America with strong experience in data engineering and AI‑driven applications. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of building scalable backend systems, delivering production data pipelines, and implementing AI‑powered workflows.
This role is hands‑on and focused on designing, developing, and operating services that power intelligent, data‑driven features, including agentic workflows, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and automated assistants, while ensuring that the underlying data foundations remain reliable, efficient, and secure.
You will collaborate closely with the Solution Architect and cross‑functional teams to deliver scalable, secure, and production‑ready systems across diverse technology stacks.
Responsibilities
AI‑Driven Backend Development
Design and implement AI‑powered workflows such as agents, assistants, and tool‑enabled services.
Build and maintain backend services using modern web frameworks and server‑side languages.
Implement RAG‑style retrieval systems and contribute to prompt engineering and model interaction patterns.
Integrate LLMs into production environments and develop scalable service layers around model inference and orchestration.
Work with vector search technologies and embedding pipelines where needed.
Data Engineering & Analytics Enablement
Design and operate ETL/ELT pipelines for batch, streaming, or hybrid workloads.
Model data for analytics and application needs using best practices in schema design and storage optimization.
Implement data quality, validation, auditing, and observability mechanisms.
Ensure secure, reliable connectivity across cloud, on‑premise, and hybrid environments.
Collaborate to define semantic business logic, reusable metrics, and shared data assets.
API & Integration Development
Design and implement scalable APIs (REST, Queues, Events).
Build integrations that connect AI systems to external applications, services, or platforms.
Implement secure patterns for authentication, authorization, and secrets management.
Ensure the overall backend architecture remains modular, maintainable, and extensible.
Database & Performance Optimization
Write and optimize complex queries across relational and NoSQL databases.
Design efficient schemas, indexing strategies, and caching solutions to support high‑performance AI/data workloads.
Conduct load/performance testing and implement safeguards to meet system reliability targets.
Data lake management
Conduct and lead data Governance and data security best practices
Scalability, Security & Reliability
Architect and implement systems for scalability, reliability, and security across backend and data layers.
Add and maintain observability (logs, metrics, traces), alerting, and runbooks.
Contribute to CI/CD, automation, and environment‑based deployments.
Comply with privacy and security norms and rules such as PII, HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, or similar.
Cross‑Functional Collaboration
Work with AI researchers to produce models and evaluate performance.
Collaborate with the Solution Architect to align designs with long‑term architecture.
Partner with Product to translate AI and data capabilities into meaningful user features.
Stay informed on emerging AI, backend, and data engineering technologies and share knowledge with the team.
Qualifications
Technical skills:
7+ years of experience in data engineering with exposure to back-end engineering and AI‑powered systems.
Proven experience delivering production‑grade services, APIs, and data pipelines end‑to‑end.
Strong knowledge in one programming language for implementing data pipelines (Python, R, Java, Go, C#).
Hands‑on experience integrating or building systems powered by large language models (LLMs) or similar AI technologies.
Experience implementing RAG pipelines, vector search, or agentic automation frameworks (any stack).
Knowledge on any AI Agent Framework (CrewAI, OpenAI, Langchain).
Strong knowledge on Jupyter Notebook.
Strong understanding of API design, service architecture, and secure integration patterns.
Solid SQL skills and strong grounding in data modeling, schema optimization, and performance tuning.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and cloud environments (any provider).
Soft skills:
Strong ownership and accountability; able to work independently in fast‑moving environments.
Pragmatic, iterative mindset aligned with product delivery and rapid experimentation.
Excellent collaboration skills across engineering, product, and AI/data teams.
Continuous learning mentality, especially with rapidly evolving AI tooling.
Clear, concise communication of technical decisions, trade‑offs, and risks.
Bonus skills:
Experience with vector databases, orchestration tools, or background workers/queues.
Familiarity with cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) or containerization environments.
Experience with streaming technologies, event‑driven patterns, or data lake architectures.
Exposure to performance testing, observability frameworks, or model evaluation/monitoring tools.
Exposure to Medallion Architecture
Understanding of emerging ecosystem tools such as Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Why Upstart13?
We put people first at Upstart 13! We believe the world is filled with amazing people and we are willing to go to great lengths to seek out others who share our values to join our cause of bringing down borders in technology for people everywhere.
We develop leaders at Upstart 13, we focus on what matters to do meaningful work, we own our shit, we stay curious, and we understand responsibility leads to giving. We do big things together!
Perks:
Job-type: long-term, full-time job.
Fully remote.
USD competitive salary.
20+ Paid time off days.
Are you ready to join our cause? Be sure to ask, “why 13?”