Senior Data Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Microsoft
San Francisco Bay area / New York City metropolitan area / U.S.2026-04-17onsite

About the job

We are building a large-scale data platform that transforms raw system logs into high-quality, structured datasets used for experimentation and analytics. The platform processes terabytes to petabytes of data daily and serves as a foundational asset for multiple teams. This Senior Data Engineer - AI Infrastructure role focuses on designing and implementing data pipelines, ensuring correctness, and building scalable data models. You will work closely with data scientists and platform engineers to ensure that data is accurate, reliable, and usable for downstream decision-making. We are looking for engineers who care deeply about data correctness, understand how systems behave at scale, and can translate complex data into well-structured, reliable datasets.

Responsibilities

Design and implement large-scale data pipelines using PySpark and distributed processing frameworks

Build and maintain data models that accurately represent underlying system behavior and business logic

Ensure high standards of data correctness, completeness, and consistency across datasets

Develop validation, monitoring, and alerting mechanisms to detect data quality issues

Partner with data scientists to support experimentation and analytics use cases

Collaborate with platform engineers to ensure efficient data ingestion, processing, and storage

Optimize pipelines for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency

Define and enforce best practices for schema design, data transformations, and pipeline reliability

Qualifications

Minimum

Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling, or data engineering OR equivalent experience.

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:  Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred

Experience with Azure technologies such as: ADLS Gen2 (Blob Storage), Synapse Spark, Azure Data Explorer (ADX)

Experience working with structured and semi-structured data (e.g., JSON logs)

Familiarity with experimentation and analytics workflows

Experience with orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow)

Exposure to privacy, compliance, and secure data handling practices

5+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering with a strong focus on data systems

Strong experience with PySpark or similar distributed data processing frameworks

Experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines

Strong understanding of data modeling and schema design

Experience ensuring data quality and correctness in production systems

Proficiency in Python

Experience working with cloud-based data platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP)

Ability to reason about data at scale, including performance and failure modes