Data Architect

S taff AI Engineer

USA (Remote) with 20% Travel.

At Robots & Pencils, we build meaningful, scalable digital products that solve real business problems.

We’re looking for a AI Data Architect to support the development and delivery of complex, integration-heavy platforms. This role is ideal for an experienced architect who can confidently own features and deployments, and contributes to team leadership within a pod.

In this role, you will work as a key contributor on a cross-functional team, building across the stack while helping guide delivery, improve systems, and solve challenging integration problems, including AI-native platforms such as agentic learning systems designed to enable human-centered learning in the Age of AI.

By joining us, you leverage our Advanced AWS Partnership and the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of 190,000.

What You’ll Do

Craft & Delivery

• Design and implement scalable and reliable approaches to support or automate decision making throughout the business
• Apply a range of data architecture techniques and tools combined with subject matter expertise to solve difficult business problems and cases in which the solution approach is unclear
• Acquire data by building the necessary SQL / ETL queries and import processes through various company specific interfaces for accessing S3, RedShift, and Spark storage systems
• Validate models against alternative approaches, expected and observed outcomes, and other business defined key performance indicators
• Implement models that comply with evaluations of the computational demands, accuracy, and reliability of the relevant ETL processes at various stages of production
• Implement and deploy state of the art machine learning algorithms under Gen AI, build prototypes, troubleshoot customer issues, and explore new solutions
• Interact closely with customers and with the academic community to drive innovation and deliver tailored data science solutions

Collaboration & Communication

• Build relationships with stakeholders and counterparts to understand business needs and translate them into data science solutions
• Collaborate closely with engineering, analytics, AI, and product teams to align data science models and insights with broader business goals
• Communicate findings and model results clearly to non-technical executive audiences, ensuring insights are actionable and understood

Leadership & Influence

• Establish data architecture best practices and standards that lift the quality and consistency of work across the team
• Mentor junior and mid-level data engineers, helping them grow their craft, confidence, and impact
• Bring an AI-forward mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude, Cursor, and other modern AI assistants to deliver higher-quality work at pace

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of Data Engineering/ Software Engineering Experience, 5+ years of architecture experience
• Strong experience with Python and Node.js
• Experience with LLM function/tool calling, prompt engineering, multi-agent orchestration, vector databases (OpenSearch), embeddings, streaming LLM responses, RAG concepts.
• Experience working with AWS tools such as Bedrock, Lambda, OpenSearch, Step Functions.
• End-to-end architecture; ensures CIL alignment; Owns non-functional requirements such as latency, scale, and compliance
• Experience in production environment building scalable systems
• Familiarity with databases (SQL and/or NoSQL, including scalable design patterns)
• Demonstrated leadership and technical mentoring experience across a team or organization
• Strong stakeholder communication skills with the ability to translate technical depth across audiences
• Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and expert knowledge of AI-forward coding tools such as Claude and Cursor
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate highly ambiguous technical and business challenges with sound judgment

Nice to Have

• Demonstrated ability to reason about system-wide impacts of changes, including downstream effects across services and data layers.
• Demonstrated ability to identify design gaps in requirements and raise them before they reach development.
• Experience with Langfuse, synthetic AI testing, token cost optimization, reasoning effort configuration, Step Functions for AI workflows.

You’ll Do Well Here if You Are

• A doer. You see something broken and fix it. You'd rather move on clarity than wait for certainty.
• A fast learner who knows you don't know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You're senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway.
• Direct in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You'd rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke.
• Obsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don't put your name on work you wouldn't stand behind.
• Built for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing.
• All in. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
• Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you.
• Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion