LLM Data Engineer

We are a worker-owned creative collective, innovating on everything from brands and IRL communities to IoT devices and cross-platform apps. We share profit, open source everything, spin out new businesses, and invest in exciting ideas through financial and/or in-kind contributions.

Our client roster includes Google, Stripe, Figma, Hinge, Black Socialists in America, ACLU, Pratt, Parsons, Mozilla, The Nobel Prize, MIT, Gnosis, Etsy & Gagosian. We’re the software team behind innovative products like The Light Phone & Mill, and a global, decentralized community space collective called Index Space.

We think of garden3d as a collective for creative people, prioritizing a happy, talented, and diverse studio culture. We work on projects that bring value to our world, balancing deep care for the work we do with a genuine curiosity about life outside of our jobs.

Right now, we’re looking for a Data Engineer with expertise in data pipelines, workflow orchestration, and data integration. Our current approach to data ingestion relies on an in-house application that defines lightweight workflows in code and executes them with queues. We’re expanding this process by adopting Prefect as an orchestration tool, enabling us to manage pipelines for structured and unstructured data from diverse sources, including web crawls and scrapers.

In this role, you’ll work on a variety of client projects to find cost-effective, high-quality, pragmatic solutions to complex problems. Responsibilities will include:

• Monitoring and maintaining data pipelines, troubleshooting new errors, and addressing format drift
• Extracting and enriching additional data elements from diverse sources
• Reprocessing and validating large datasets in batch workflows
• Designing and integrating new data sources into existing pipelines
• Aligning and integrating extracted data with the core application data model to ensure consistency and usability
• Participating in code reviews, providing constructive feedback to teammates and ensuring adherence to best practices
• Contributing to project success by keeping a close eye on team velocity, project scope, budget, and timeline
• Negotiating with clients to align project scope with budget and timeline, if needed

The person we’re looking for is happy, relaxed and easy to get along with. They’re flexible on anything except conceits that will lower their usually outstanding work quality. They work smart, by carefully managing their workflow and staggering features with dependencies. They prefer deep work but are OK coming up for top-level/strategic conversations.

We believe people with interests in design, art, music, food or fashion tend to have a well-rounded sense of design and quality — so a variety of hobbies or side projects is a nice-to-have.

Our pay scale ranges from $85 p/hr to $130 p/hr pending seniority and team leadership experience, and our projects are rarely less than 8 full-time weeks at 40 hours per week. We also pay discretionary bonuses for going over and above, such as training and coaching others, winning new business, or speaking at conferences.

We prefer long-standing relationships with highly accountable and communicative team members, so we encourage longer-term engagements. A Data Engineer working 40–45 full-time weeks may take home $150k–$200k USD
.

• Strong proficiency in Python
• Experience with data/workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Prefect, Dagster, Airflow)
• A thorough understanding of ETL and data transformation for ingestion of industry-standard LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, etc.)
• Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Skilled in interfacing with APIs (OpenAI, Google Gemini/Vertex, etc.) using wrapper libraries
• Practical experience in prompt engineering
• Ability to work with structured outputs and potentially tool calling
• 5+ years of general backend experience (Ruby on Rails, Elixir Phoenix, Python Django, or Node Express) and/or native app development (React Native, Flutter, Android, AOSP, Kotlin/Java)

We’re always exploring new technology niches. Some areas relevant to us include:

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP),…