Data Engineer

AKIVA is an AI-native engineering firm specializing in enterprise services, domain-specific solutions, and high-performance infrastructure from strategy through deployment. We build innovative systems that drive measurable results for commercial enterprises and government agencies. AKIVA is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).

Position Overview

Design and build the data infrastructure powering AKIVA AI systems. Architect pipelines that move terabytes reliably, enable ML at scale, and meet enterprise governance requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Build batch and streaming data pipelines that feed training, evaluation, and inference systems
• Design schemas and storage layers (data lake, warehouse, vector stores) for ML workloads
• Implement data quality, lineage, and governance controls
• Partner with ML engineers on feature engineering and retrieval pipelines
• Optimize cost and performance of cloud data platforms

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years in data engineering on modern stacks
• Strong SQL and Python; experience with at least one orchestrator (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect)
• Production experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) or lakehouses (Databricks, Iceberg)
• Solid understanding of data modeling and pipeline reliability

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building retrieval pipelines for RAG systems
• Vector database experience (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Qdrant)
• Streaming experience (Kafka, Kinesis, Pulsar)

What AKIVA Offers

• Professional development and skill-building opportunities
• Supportive management team with Veteran-owned company values
• Opportunity to work on impactful client engagements
• Long-term contract engagement with potential for extension
• AI productivity tools and training provided at no cost to employees
• 401(k) with generous company match
• Medical Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Profit Sharing

AKIVA is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

AKIVA is committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical disability, marital status, military and Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believe that diversity among our teammates is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people within a qualified candidate pool.

AKIVA is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).