Lead Data Engineer – Build AI Data Platform (Contract)

About the role

As a Lead Data Engineer you will design and scale the data infrastructure that powers an AI platform for property‑management operations. You will work closely with AI, backend, product and leadership teams to define the data architecture and set engineering standards for a fast‑growing company.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure for AI and product systems.
• Design and maintain data ingestion, transformation, and storage architectures for both operational and AI workloads.
• Develop and manage batch and real‑time data pipelines, including vector‑search and machine‑learning data flows.
• Ensure data reliability, security, and governance across the platform.
• Collaborate with AI and backend engineering teams to support model training, inference, and product features.
• Implement monitoring, observability, and data‑quality frameworks.
• Optimize performance of large‑scale datasets and query systems.
• Contribute to technical architecture decisions and long‑term data strategy.
• Define data culture, standards, and hiring criteria as the founding data hire.
• Partner directly with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into product decisions.

Required profile

• 7+ years of professional experience, primarily in data engineering.
• Strong background designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and NoSQL databases.
• Familiarity with vector databases used in modern AI applications.
• Proven ability to make and justify architectural decisions.
• Experience building scalable backend systems and designing data models.

Required skills

• Python
• PostgreSQL (or MySQL)
• NoSQL databases
• Vector databases
• Data pipeline development (batch and real‑time)
• Distributed data systems