Data Engineer - USA | Remote
About the Company
Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc. (SGA) is a women-owned technology and resource solutions provider that connects professionals with technology projects across a range of industries. The company focuses on customer service, employee development, quality, and integrity, taking a personal approach to solving technology challenges.
About the Role
SGA is seeking a Data Engineer for a remote contract assignment with a leading infrastructure services client. In this role, you’ll build and maintain the data infrastructure supporting AI and machine learning initiatives, including model training, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and production ML systems. Working at the intersection of data engineering and applied AI, you’ll help make structured and unstructured data reliable, accessible, and well-governed for analytics and AI applications. You’ll collaborate with machine learning engineers and data scientists to develop pipelines that support model development, evaluation, and deployment while maintaining data quality, security, 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 and ML applications. Build and maintain vector embedding pipelines and support integration with vector databases. 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 supply AI systems. Optimize data pipelines for performance and cost, including the use of Dynamic Tables and streaming ingestion. Support MLOps and LLMOps workflows by versioning datasets and tracking training data to maintain reproducibility and compliance. Implement data entitlement and access-control logic to ensure AI systems only access authorized information.
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 RAG architectures. 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 LLM application frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex. Location & Work Arrangement Work Arrangement: Remote Employment Type: Contract Client Industry: Infrastructure Services About SGA SGA values customer service, employee development, and quality and integrity in its work. The company is committed to equal employment opportunities and providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. 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 its services, programs, and activities.