Role overview

Role: Data / AI Native Engineer

Location: Canada (Remote)

Type: Contract

Strong signals

AI used inside the pipeline, not just in app code - AI-assisted schema inference, automated data quality rules, LLM-based anomaly detection, AI-generated PySpark transformations. This is the single strongest differentiator for this role.
AI-enabled data products - feature stores, vector stores, RAG data layers, embedding pipelines
Streaming at volume - Structured Streaming, Kafka, Kinesis, Auto Loader
Modern lakehouse patterns - SCD2, CDC, idempotent writes, schema evolution, data contracts
dbt, Airflow, Databricks Workflows, Delta Live Tables

Typical titles that map

Senior/Lead/Principal Data Engineer Data Platform Engineer Analytics Engineer (senior) Data Engineering Manager with active IC work
Titles that usually don't map
ETL Developer (Informatica/AbInitio/DataStage heritage, no cloud-native rebuild) BI/Report Developer Data Architect (diagrams-only, no code) DBA Hadoop Administrator