Sr. Data Engineer

Location:

This position can be located in the following area(s):
United States (remote)

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience.

We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.

We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and deliver the data and AI infrastructure behind an enterprise agentic AI platform. This role is ideal for an engineer with several years of experience who can confidently own features end-to-end, contribute to architectural decisions, and bring strong technical judgment to the problems they take on.

In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team alongside AWS Professional Services, embedded with a large enterprise client. You'll help scale an observability data platform from an initial single-agent pilot to a fully automated, end-to-end operations model, building the data pipelines, observability, and agent-enablement tooling around it. You'll be joining real, in-flight work where reliability, security, and scalability matter.

You'll collaborate with experienced engineers to enhance existing systems, deliver new capabilities, and contribute to the technical decisions that shape how the platform scales over time.

At Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate.

Every role here contributes directly to that mission. Here, you shape how AI systems integrate into enterprise operations, how teams move at real velocity, and how products create measurable impact for clients and the people they serve. We ship production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days. That pace demands people who take ownership, lead with craft, and care deeply about what they put their name on.

• Design, implement, and deploy data and AI/ML systems on AWS end-to-end, from concept through production, including data lake pipelines, observability instrumentation, and optimization for performance, reliability, and cost
• Maintain and evolve platforms in production, monitoring for drift, debugging issues, and driving ongoing improvements to reliability and scalability
• Bring an AI-forward coding mindset to your daily work, using 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 the work with broader platform and business goals
• Translate technical tradeoffs, system behavior, and constraints into terms non-specialists can act on
• Participate actively in code reviews and design discussions, raising concerns and offering constructive feedback

• Contribute to data and AI architecture decisions with thoughtful perspective on tradeoffs and long-term implications
• Take ownership of meaningful work end-to-end,…