Principal Data Engineer, GenAI

A career at CoBank can offer you the opportunity to make a personal impact on the people and communities where we do order to be the best we hire the best!

Remarkable Benefits Offered by CoBank

• Careers with a purpose
• Time-Off Packages 20 days of vacation 10 paid sick days and 11 paid holidays
• Competitive Compensation & Incentive
• Hybrid work model: flexible arrangements for most positions
• Benefits Packages including Medical Dental and Vision coverage Disability AD&D and Life Insurance
• Robust associate training and development with CoBank University
• Tuition reimbursement for higher education up to $10k per year
• Outstanding 401k: up to 6% matching and additional 3% non-elective contribution & Student Loan Match
• Community Impact: United Way Angel Day Volunteer Day and Associate Directed Contribution
• Associate Resource Groups: creating a culture of respect and inclusion
• Recognize a fellow associate through our GEM awards

We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer GenAI to lead the integration of generative AI capabilities into our data this role you will blend deep expertise in data engineering with cutting-edge AI/ML integration building scalable pipelines and infrastructure that power next-generation AI applications. You will design and optimize data architecture and pipelines (both batch and real-time) to support Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and adapter-based fine-tuning of LLMs using proprietary domain data leveraging cloud-native technologies (primarily AWS) and open-source tools. This role requires close collaboration with cross-functional teams (Data Engineering Data Science Api Experience Product Risk Compliance etc) to deliver innovative AI-driven solutions aligned with business goals while ensuring our data systems are secure compliant and highly performant.

• Leads the design and optimization of scalable data pipelines and architecture to support GenAI use cases including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and adapter-based fine-tuning of LLMs using proprietary domain data.
• Builds and manages embedding workflows leveraging frontier LLMs (e.g. OpenAI Anthropic Meta Mistral) and ensures efficient storage and semantic retrieval of vectorized content using vector databases such as FAISS Weaviate OpenSearch Azure AI Search or AWS Kendra.
• Develops ingestion and transformation workflows for unstructured content (e.g. PDFs reports emails) including chunking semantic tagging and metadata enrichment to power GenAI and semantic search applications.
• Partners with engineering product and data stakeholders to prototype and scale GenAI services while establishing patterns and frameworks that lay the foundation for future ML and AI capabilities at CoBank.
• Defines and enforces data governance quality and compliance standards across GenAI pipelines for both structured and unstructured data ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements (e.g. CCPA GDPR EU AI Act) and industry frameworks such as ISO/IEC 400 NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) and OECD AI Principles.
• Provides architectural leadership and technical mentorship ensuring integration of GenAI systems into CoBanks analytics and EKS-based microservices platform and aligning with existing CI/CD GitOps and observability frameworks.

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science Information Technology or related field. required
• Bachelors degree may be substituted with four years of related experience (four years is in addition to what is minimally required for the role) or an equivalent combination of education and related experience.
• Masters Degree in Computer Science Information Technology or related field. preferred

• 10 years of progressive experience in data engineering with a strong foundation in building scalable secure and high-performance data pipelines including both batch and real-time architectures. required
• 5 years of experience leading data architecture and engineering efforts in cloud environments (preferably AWS) with demonstrated expertise in tools such as Apache Spark SQL Python Airflow Kafka and modern data lake/lakehouse architectures. required
• 3 years of hands-on experience with GenAI/ML infrastructure including experience designing and building embedding pipelines vector databases (e.g. FAISS Weaviate OpenSearch) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. required
• Prior Experience mentoring technical teams and guiding architectural decisions across cross-functional stakeholders in engineering product and risk/compliance functions. required
• Prior Experience processing and transforming unstructured data (e.g. PDFs reports knowledge bases) into AI-ready formats including semantic chunking metadata enrichment and content classification. required
• Prior Experience working with or integrating hosted LLM services via AWS Bedrock Azure AI Foundry or similar platforms as part of production-ready applications. required
• Proven track record in building and operationalizing data solutions that integrate with LLMs including adapter-based fine-tuning techniques (e.g. LoRA PEFT) and/or prompt engineering strategies to align model behavior with domain-specific use cases.
• Strong familiarity with CI/CD and GitOps workflows (e.g. GitHub Actions ArgoCD) infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform) and Kubernetes-based deployments (especially EKS).

The typical base pay range for this role is between $174500 - $235637. Compensation may vary based on individual job-related knowledge skills expertise and experience. This position is eligible for a discretionary annual incentive program driven by organization and individual performance.

The listed salary other compensation and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. This job will be posted for a minimum of five (5) business days or until the position is filled. CoBank reserves the right to adjust compensation for all positions and to modify or discontinue benefits programs at any time in its sole discretion subject to applicable law.

CoBank is a cooperative bank serving vital industries across rural America. The bank provides loans leases export financing and other financial services to agribusinesses and rural power water and communications providers in all 50 states. The bank also provides wholesale loans and other financial services to affiliated Farm Credit associations serving more than 76000 farmers ranchers and other rural borrowers in 23 states around the country. CoBank is a member of the Farm Credit System a nationwide network of banks and retail lending associations chartered to support the borrowing needs of U.S. agriculture rural infrastructure and rural communities. Headquartered outside Denver Colorado CoBank serves customers from regional banking centers across the U.S. and also maintains an international representative office in Singapore.

REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION

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Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.

CoBank is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation national origin disability or status as a protected veteran.