Lead Data Engineer

Position: Lead Data Engineer
Location: Cary, NC (On-site / Hybrid)
Duration:: Full-Time-W2
Architecture & Governance

• 12–18 years of total experience in data engineering, data platform delivery, or related disciplines.
• Proven delivery of a medallion/lakehouse architecture at enterprise scale — not just familiarity with the concept.
• Azure security and governance: Entra ID, managed identities, RBAC, POSIX ACLs on ADLS Gen2, Key Vault, private endpoints, and PII handling.
• CI/CD and infrastructure as code: Azure DevOps, Terraform, Databricks Asset Bundles, and automated testing of data pipelines.
• Clear technical writing and the ability to present and defend a design to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

• 3+ years designing and shipping LLM-based systems in production: RAG pipelines, agentic / tool-calling workflows, structured output, chunking and embedding strategy, vector and hybrid retrieval, and prompt engineering.
• Evaluation discipline — golden datasets, regression suites, accuracy and hallucination tracking, human-in-the-loop feedback loops; you measure AI quality, not assert it.
• Hands-on experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or LangGraph, plus at least one provider stack (Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, or Databricks Model Serving).
• Metadata-driven thinking — schema inference, data profiling, lineage, catalogs, and configuration-driven frameworks that onboard the next source without new code.