This role suits an experienced engineer with several years of background who can confidently own features end-to-end, contribute to architectural decisions, and bring strong technical judgment to enterprise agentic AI platforms. The position is a full-time remote opportunity based in the United States with Robots and Pencils.
Role Overview
Robots and Pencils is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and deliver data and AI infrastructure behind an enterprise agentic AI platform. Working as a key contributor on a cross-functional team alongside AWS Professional Services, the engineer helps scale an observability data platform from a single-agent pilot to a fully automated operations model. The position involves establishing agentic AI frameworks, data pipelines, observability, and service enablement in a production environment.
Key Responsibilities
Design, implement, and deploy data and AI/ML systems on AWS end-to-end, covering data lake pipelines, observability instrumentation, and performance optimization.
Establish an agentic AI framework and supporting tooling, taking workloads from single-agent pilots to fleet-scale operations.
Maintain and evolve production platforms by monitoring for drift, debugging issues, and driving reliability and scalability improvements.
Use AI-forward coding tools like Claude and Cursor to ship higher-quality work at pace.
Partner closely with AWS Professional Services, client engineering, and data teams to align work with business goals.
Translate technical tradeoffs, system behavior, and constraints into terms non-specialists can act on.
Participate in code reviews and design discussions while contributing to data and AI architecture decisions.
Raise engineering standards through personal execution and by supporting more junior engineers.
Requirements
Five plus years of professional software or data engineering experience, including at least two years building data platforms and shipping AI/ML or agentic systems in production on AWS.
Strong software engineering background using Python and SQL or similar languages.
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate certification, or a clear near-term path to earning it.
Hands-on experience building AWS data lakes with S3, Lake Formation, Glue, Athena, Iceberg, or Parquet, along with streaming exposure on Kinesis or MSK.
Experience with observability for distributed and AI systems using CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry/ADOT, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Grafana, and SageMaker Model Monitor.
Practical experience with agent enablement on AWS including Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, RAG, Bedrock Agents, and frameworks like Strands Agents or LangGraph.
Experience designing and shipping agentic AI systems in production environments.
Experience with MLOps and LLMOps practices covering evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
Infrastructure as code experience using AWS CDK, plus 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.
Delivery experience in a consulting or professional services setting alongside client and partner teams.
Day-to-day knowledge and usage of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
Nice to Have
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.
Skills and Tools
AWS (S3, Lake Formation, Glue, Athena, Iceberg, Parquet, Kinesis, MSK, CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry/ADOT, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Grafana, SageMaker Model Monitor, Bedrock, CDK)
Python and SQL
Strands Agents and LangGraph
Claude Code and Cursor
Salary and Benefits
Compensation range: $119,514 USD to $164,899 USD.
About the Company
Robots and Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm founded in 2009 that builds business architecture and AI co-workers for enterprise operations. The organization operates delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, serving clients across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.
How to Apply
Apply on the official company careers page.
