Senior Data Engineer (AI/ML)

Senior Data Engineer (ML & Intelligence focus)The OpportunityAt Finalsite, we empower schools to tell their stories and engage their communities through world-class digital tools. As our Senior Data Engineer, you will be the primary architect of the intelligence layer that powers these experiences, ensuring our AI-driven features are as reliable as they are innovative. This is a unique opportunity to build at the intersection of EdTech and GenAI, directly influencing how 10,000+ schools utilize data to protect their students and streamline their operations.The MissionThe mission of the Senior Data Engineer is to architect, scale, and maintain a high-performance, multi-region data platform that serves as the backbone for Finalsite’s 'Ask AI' and analytics suites. You will own the production reliability of our machine learning systems, ensuring that our models, ranging from LLMs to threat detection operate with cost-efficiency, security, and context-awareness at a global scale.12-Month OutcomesScale Ask AI to 10k Clients: Successfully migrate and scale our primary AI feature to 10,000 clients while maintaining a 99.9% uptime and optimizing per-query costs by 20%+.Implement Context-Aware Security: Architect and deploy a context-aware threat detection layer onto our existing learning models to proactively identify and mitigate risks for school communities.Modernize the Data Backbone: Complete the evaluation and initial migration of one legacy data system to a next-gen streaming or warehouse architecture (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, or Iceberg).Establish Data Observability: Define and implement a comprehensive data quality and lineage framework that reduces manual 'data cleaning' debt by 30% through automation.Launch Analytics Features: Partner with Product to transition 'Ask AI' from a conversational tool into a proactive insights engine, delivering actionable analytics to school administrators.Key ResponsibilitiesArchitect Multi-Region Platforms: Design and maintain robust data pipelines (streaming and batch) that support a global footprint, ensuring low latency and high availability across multiple regions.Productionize ML Reliability: Lead the LLMOps strategy, focusing on the stability, versioning, and cost-effective scaling of large language models in a production environment.Drive Data Governance: Architect privacy-first security controls and compliance frameworks (GDPR/FERPA) to ensure school data is handled with the highest integrity.Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Act as a technical bridge between Product Owners, SRE, and Engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable data roadmaps.Evaluate Next-Gen Tech: Research and prototype emerging data technologies to keep Finalsite at the cutting edge of the EdTech landscape.Mentor and Influence: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other data engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, observability, and continuous improvement.Required SkillsAdvanced Data Modeling: Deep expertise in designing scalable schemas for both relational databases and modern data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery).Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven experience building and managing high-throughput streaming platforms using tools like Kafka, Flink, or Spark Streaming.Production ML/LLM Engineering: Hands-on experience deploying LLMs in production, including RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures, prompt engineering, and vector database management.Systems Programming & Scripting: Mastery of Python and SQL, with a strong grasp of building production-grade internal tools and automation.Infrastructure as Code & Cloud: Proficiency in managing cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and CI/CD pipelines to ensure repeatable, reliable deployments.Observability Mindset: Experience implementing data observability tools (e.g., Monte Carlo, Great Expectations) to track data lineage and health proactively.How you can leverage GenAI in this roleWe expect our Senior Data Engineers to be 'power users' of the technology they build. In this role, you are encouraged to:Use AI coding assistants (Copilot, Claude) to accelerate boilerplate development and unit testing.Implement LLMs to automate complex data mapping and cleaning tasks that previously required manual intervention.Leverage GenAI to generate synthetic datasets for stress-testing multi-region pipelines and threat detection models without compromising real-user privacy.Automate the creation and maintenance of technical documentation and data dictionaries.Nice to Have SkillsEdTech Experience: Familiarity with the specific privacy and data needs of K-12 or Higher Ed institutions.Security Specialization: Previous experience in cybersecurity or building automated threat-detection systems.Open Source Contribution: A history of contributing to data engineering or ML open-source projects.LocationRemote anywhere within Poland. There is a Finalsite office in Krakow if you prefer a hybrid setting.EmploymentThis is a B2B employment opportunity. Potential candidates are required to be Polish Citizens or Permanent Residents. Finalsite is a global company and to enable strong collaboration, we have established common core working hours. Candidates should be comfortable working from 11:00-19:00 CET, with core working hours being 16:00-19:00 CETRESIDENCY REQUIREMENTFinalsite offers 100% fully remote employment opportunities, however, these opportunities are limited to permanent residents of Poland. Current residency, as well as continued residency, within Poland is required to obtain (and retain) employment with Finalsite.DISCLOSURESFinalsite is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact Finalsite's People Operations Team. Finalsite is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Finalsite will ensure that persons with disabilities or special needs are provided a reasonable accommodation. Ensure your Finalsite job offer is legitimate and don't fall victim to fraud. Ask your recruiter for a phone call or other type of verbal communication and ensure all email correspondence is from a finalsite.com email address. For added security, where possible, apply through our company website at finalsite.com/jobs.