layiq
/la·yiq/adjective
worthy; deserving; fitting; suitable.
A role, opportunity, or path that merits attention, time, and pursuit.
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Job opportunity
Senior AI Platform Engineer Contract
Nextdata
San Francisco, CA
Source: Nextdata careers · View original posting
Employer job description
From Nextdata's posting. “We” and “our” refer to the employer.
Nextdata is looking for an experienced AI Platform Engineer for an initial three-month project focused on building and validating an AI-enabled data platform capability.
This is a hands-on implementation role. You will quickly ramp up on an existing project and build backend services, agent tools, APIs, and data integrations. The role has no customer-facing responsibilities and less emphasis on architecture than a principal-level position.
If successful, the project may continue and develop into a broader Nextdata product.
What You’ll Do
- Quickly understand the existing codebase, requirements, and technical direction.
- Build backend services, AI agents, tools, and APIs for governed data access.
- Implement MCP-compatible endpoints or similar agent interfaces.
- Integrate SQL, documents, APIs, metadata, semantic models, and vector search.
- Build retrieval, tool selection, context construction, and grounded response flows.
- Add access controls, policy enforcement, audit logging, tests, and observability.
- Deliver a reliable, documented system within the three-month project scope.
What We’re Looking For
- Strong experience with backend systems, data platforms, or distributed systems.
- Practical experience building agentic AI applications using LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks.
- Experience with RAG, retrieval, semantic search, tool calling, and multi-step agent workflows.
- Strong Python and API development skills.
- Experience with SQL, documents, metadata systems, and vector search.
- Familiarity with MCP or similar agent interfaces.
- Understanding of access control, policies, lineage, data quality, PII protection, and auditability.
- Ability to become productive quickly in an unfamiliar codebase.
- Good judgment on scope, trade-offs, and production readiness.
- Nice to Have
- Experience with data products, data mesh, semantic models, catalogs, or governance platforms.
- Experience with MCP servers, tool registries, or multi-step agents.
- Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Spark, DuckDB, Postgres, graph databases, or vector databases.