Data Engineer
Overview
At Ascent we are building an intelligent compliance platform that enables compliance professionals to easily track and understand their compliance obligations and related regulation. To support that platform, we are also building a premier data and machine-learning back-end; this back-end will house, coordinate, and route all of our data pipelines and machine learning models.
We are looking for experienced, passionate data engineers to join our team in Chicago. As a Data Engineer at Ascent, you will be working closely with Data Scientists and the broader tech team to build infrastructure that a) ingests and coordinates data (e.g. regulations, customer data, machine learning features, etc); b) deploys and runs data microservices such as machine learning models or other transformations; c) facilitates workflows across these microservices and data layers; and d) tests, monitors, and reports on itself.
We use both hosted solutions and open source tools. We have a strong bias towards containerization and internal transparency. We also place a high premium on our culture and values, both within the tech team and the company as a whole. We believe a diversity of opinions and perspectives creates a stronger team and product, and we are committed to an equal opportunity hiring process.
Responsibilities
- Design and build infrastructure to host machine learning models as microservices using modern conventions and coding practices
- Help design and implement data models and database layers that support our data science activities
- Use creativity and independent thinking to solve technical problems
- Work closely with data scientists to understand their needs and processes
- Work closely with our whole technology team to successfully grow our data platform alongside the broader technology stack
- Craft strong and consistent internal API conventions and documentation
- Implement with an emphasis on tests, maintainability, and clean coding practices to produce simple solutions and reduce technical debt
Minimum Skills and Experience
- 3+ years developing and maintaining back-end services in production, preferably using container-based architectures
- Experience with large data sets and modern tools for handling them such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Mesos, etc
- Demonstrated ability to develop creative technical solutions given a set of business requirements and a deep understanding of modern data architectures
- Demonstrated ability to work productively on small teams and maintain workstreams independently if needed
- Proficient in SQL, *nix CLI tools (grep/sed/awk/BASH, etc), and Python
- Familiarity with Java and an understanding of the JVM ecosystem
- Experience deploying and maintaining code using git-based tools and operating in a continuous deployment/integration environment
- Experience writing thorough tests and documentation for maintainable code-bases
Preferred Skills and Experience
- 2+ years building and maintaining data science pipelines that incorporate machine learning models in a production environment behind an API
- Experience working with data scientists in production roles
- Experience with container management solutions like Kubernetes, Marathon, etc
- Experience with solutions for “fast data” architectures like DC/OS or other similar architectures and tools
- Experience working with and storing large amounts of text data and text transformations
Benefits
Ascent employees enjoy many benefits and perks, including:
- Medical, dental, vision insurance - premiums fully paid by Ascent
- Competitive salary and equity
- Walkable from all loop trains and many busses
- As much RAM as you can fit in a Macbook Pro