Lead Data Engineer

We're looking for a hands-on Data Engineer who can operate independently.

High-visibility, high-ownership role at the center of T4I's HR data platform direct exposure to AI initiatives, cross-functional stakeholders, and the chance to meaningfully reduce day-to-day operational load for the team.

What You'll Do

• Build, maintain, and troubleshoot Spark/EMR ETL pipelines feeding HR and Workforce data marts.
• Monitor and remediate Data Asset Score issues (data quality rules, governance/PII-minimization actions) to keep HR data assets compliant ahead of deadlines.
• Be the daily coordination point between US HR business stakeholders, the IDC (India) engineering team, and platform/infra teams - translating requirements, unblocking IDC, and reporting status.
• Triage and resolve Jira tickets/bugs raised against HR data mart pipelines; write clear runbooks and pipeline documentation.
• Build semantic layers and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Integrate REST and/or GraphQL APIs into data workflows.
• Operate with minimal oversight: escalating only true blockers and proactively flag risks before they become incidents. What You Bring

8+ years in Data Engineering, with strong hands-on Spark (PySpark/Scala), SQL, and Python.

• Experience building and operating ETL/ELT pipelines on cloud platforms (AWS EMR/S3, Databricks, or equivalent); workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar).
• Comfortable owning pipeline operations end-to-end: reading dependency graphs, diagnosing failures, working with on-call /PagerDuty/Splunk, and driving fixes with multiple teams.
• Working knowledge of data warehousing/data mart design, data governance, and PII handling practices.
• AI-native mindset: familiarity with LLM capabilities, evaluation frameworks, and the creative application of AI principles to engineering challenges. Proficiency with GenAI productivity tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Codex) to enhance engineering workflows.
• Strong communicator; comfortable directing an offshore IDC team with minimal handholding.

$45 an hour - Contract