Senior Engineer, AI/NLP Engineering

IDC's Data Engineering team is seeking a Senior Engineer, AI/NLP Engineering to lead hands-on delivery of AI-powered data engineering workflows and manage a small team of engineers. This role combines direct people management with deep, current experience operating in governed, agentic development environments and building large-scale natural language processing (NLP) pipelines that make unstructured content AI-ready.You will manage day-to-day delivery, review and direct the work of junior team members, and act as the technical point of contact with specialist stakeholders assessing feasibility, challenging proposals, and negotiating realistic delivery expectations and trade-offs.This is a hands-on management role for someone who can ramp quickly on unfamiliar codebases, exercises sound technical judgment, and is comfortable pushing back rather than overpromising.

• → Manage and direct the day-to-day work of a small team of data engineers, reviewing output alongside personal delivery responsibilities.
• →Operate extensively within Claude Code and other governed, AI-powered development workflows, applying guardrails such as safe-zone scoping and critically reviewing agent-generated plans.
• →Build and operate natural language processing (NLP) pipelines at scale that ingest, parse, chunk, embed, and extract metadata/entities from millions of documents, and extract insights via Large Language Models (LLMs) or NLP models.
• →Ramp quickly on unfamiliar codebases using documentation and skills files as the primary source of context.
• →Apply strong applied Python, SQL, and Snowflake fundamentals to assess solution feasibility and challenge technical proposals.
• →Manage stakeholder relationships and negotiations, securing specialist sign-off and communicating trade-offs or interim delivery options.
• →Exercise sound technical judgment, escalating and pushing back on unrealistic scope or timelines rather than overpromising.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field; or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience in data science, NLP, or AI/ML engineering, including at least 2 years hands-on building and shipping agentic AI or LLM applications in production, with pipelines that ingest millions of documents and prepare them to be AI-ready (parsing, chunking, embedding, metadata/entity extraction).
• Hands-on Claude Code experience is a core requirement: you have worked in a governed AI-powered workflow, understand guardrails such as safe-zone scoping, and can critically review agent-generated plans. Evidence of real usage is required.
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., Claude Agent SDK) and tool-calling / MCP-based integration patterns.
• Strong applied Python, SQL, and Snowflake fundamentals, enough to assess solution feasibility and challenge technical proposals.
• People management experience: comfortable directing and reviewing the work of junior team members alongside your own responsibilities.
• Travel: minimal (up to 10%).
• Work model: Hybrid (Czech Republic).

IDC is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all qualified persons. Employment eligibility verification required. We participate in E-Verify. #LI-Hybrid#LI-AM1