Senior AI Platform Engineer Contract

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco, CA

Employment Type: FullTime

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.

• Familiarity with OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SSO, RBAC, ABAC, SCIM, or policy engines.

• Experience evaluating retrieval quality, tool accuracy, groundedness, and failure modes.

Contract Scope

• Initial term: three to four months.

• Focus: hands-on implementation and delivery.

• No customer-facing responsibilities.

• Potential extension if the project is successful.