Senior Data/AI Engineer

ABOUT TEIŌ

The name teiō (帝王) is Japanese for undisputed mastery, a builder who is untouchable in their craft. That is the bar we hold ourselves to.

teiō is an AI transformation company. We help mid-market enterprises in the US lead the AI shift, and we do it by building. We ship production systems that work from day one. Our engineers embed directly inside client teams to learn their systems and their business, then build the things that move it.

teiō was founded by Tarush Aggarwal. Tarush was one of the first data engineers at Salesforce and has spent his career in data. He was a founding expert at the International Institute for Analytics and a columnist at The Data Scientist, one of the first print data magazines. He founded and ran the data platform company 5X as its CEO. With teiō, he is focused on what comes next: the AI-native systems that get built once the data foundations are in place.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior Data/AI Engineer to lead client engagements end to end. You will understand the business problem, design the architecture, and ship the pipelines and models the client actually runs on. You will work across different clients and industries with the best of the modern data and AI stack.

This is a lead-from-the-front role. You own the client relationship and the delivery for your engagements. Having said that for the first 6 months you will work under a lead and move to manage your own projects when you have demonstrated that you are ready.

We pay for outcomes, not hours, so speed and quality are the job. We use AI agents and accelerators across our whole delivery workflow, and we expect you to work the same way.

We hire data engineers because data foundations are the core of almost everything in AI. We expect our engineers to go deep, with AI agents and with software. We don't expect everyone to have every skill on day one. That is why these three things matter more to us than any single tool on your resume:

1. Proactive. You don't wait for permission. You see what needs doing and you start.

2. Growth mindset. Most weeks you'll do something you haven't done before. You get started quickly, figure it out, and don't wait until you feel ready.

3. Technical. Strong fundamentals beat a long list of tools. You can figure it out, even the first time you're seeing a language or a system.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

A few engagements to show the shape of the work:

• Healthcare: A healthcare company needs to move tens of thousands of patient intakes through the US healthcare system, faster and with fewer errors. You build the data foundation and the AI workflow that lets intake scale, and you stay on as volume grows.

• Hedge fund: A hedge fund wants to keep running the models its team relies on, while building solid data foundations underneath so it can build agentic systems on top. You design those foundations without disrupting how the team already works.

• Insurance: An insurer wants to open entirely new states with an AI-first process, in one of the most heavily regulated industries there is. You build the agents that makes expansion repeatable and keeps it compliant.

Across engagements, you will:

• Embed with client teams to understand their business and data, then ship the right solution, not the fanciest one.

• Build and maintain data pipelines, ETL/ELT processes, and warehouse models, plus the semantic + conversational AI layers on top.

• Design data models that power client reporting and decisions.

• Build real AI, not just pipelines. The data engineering is the foundation; on top of it you'll do serious AI work, from agents and RAG systems to AI-native workflows running in production.

• Work AI-first. Use AI to generate and review code, automate data validation and quality checks, write documentation, and move faster, then bring those gains to your clients.

• Own the client relationship for your work, with proactive updates, real scoping conversations, and risks surfaced early.

• Stay current with the data and AI ecosystem and fold what works back into how we deliver.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• 8+ years in data engineering, with a track record of delivering end to end in production.

• Strong SQL and Python.

• Core data engineering stack, the basics: warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks), modeling (dbt), orchestration (Airflow or Dagster), and a semantic layer (Cube or dbt). This is table stakes.

• Agentic stack, where we go deep: LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI), agent frameworks and protocols (LangGraph, MCP), AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex), and RAG with vector stores (pgvector, Pinecone). This is newer and moves fast, so we care that you can pick it up, not that you've used all of it.

• You use AI tools every day in how you build, and you have real opinions about where they help and where they fall short.

• Bonus: applying AI or ML to data problems like anomaly detection, data quality monitoring, or automated insights.

• You can talk to a customer with the same ease with which you build datasets.

• You get things done with minimal supervision. You unblock yourself, you communicate, and you treat the client's outcome as your own.

HOW WE PAY

We think paying for time is broken. On a factory line, hours were a fair proxy for output. In our world the best people deliver multiples more than everyone else, and AI widens that gap. So we built comp around what you deliver, not how long you have been here or what your title says.

You get a base salary and that is your floor. Beyond a normal month of delivery, you share in the value you create. It is real money, paid every month, and it is why our strongest engineers take home 2 to 3x their base. It is all tracked on a live leaderboard the whole company can see. We are open about it on purpose. The people at the top are not doing anything secret. Watch what they do and copy it.

HOW WE WORK

• 100% remote. Work from wherever you do your best work.

• Outcomes, not hours. What ships is what counts.

• Transparency. We're transparent about what's happening on the inside and expect you to be the same.

• Growth mindset. We're curious and love to learn and experiment.

• Fun. We love what we do and it feels like the best work of our careers. We expect it to be the same for you.

THE FASTEST WAY IN: BUILD SOMETHING

If this role excites you and you can't wait to speak with us, the strongest thing you can do is build a project and send it to letsbuild@teio.ai. Skip the resume review and go straight to the final round.

Here is the honest truth about applying, here and everywhere else: we get a high volume of applications, and even though we try, we do not get to review most resumes. So we built a faster way in. Send us a project demonstrating your capabilities based on what you think will be impactful for us. If your project qualifies, you skip the resume review entirely and go straight to the final round.

This is our front door, not a side door. We expect most of our final round candidates to come from here. A resume is a weak signal for the one thing we actually care about, which is whether you can build.

Don't overthink it. Build something real with the modern data and AI stack, use AI the way you would on the job, and ship it.