Senior Data Engineer

With a history that dates back over 80 years, Starcom is a global communications planning and media leader. We are an agency still grounded in our founding principle that people are at the centre of all we do. Each day, we apply this belief to harness the transformative power of data and technology to inspire and move people and business forward. With more than 7,000 employees in over 100 offices around the world, we are the flagship Publicis Media agency that uses our 'Power of One' business model, with teams that span multiple disciplines across clients such as Aldi, P&G, P&O Ferries, Primark, Samsung, Stellantis, and Visa. We place a huge focus on our People and have driven flagship D&I and L&D programmes within Publicis Media; our goal is to help every individual reach their fullest potential and we encourage everyone to make "Brave Plays" in how they approach their work and their own career development. As a result, we have an exceptionally energised and committed talent base, all of us proud of our welcoming and supportive culture, as evidenced by our recognition as one of Campaign's Best Places to Work for three years in a row (2021, 2022 and 2023) and most excitingly, Media Week's Agency of the Year 2023!

What will you be doing?

This role presents an opportunity to engage deeply with MLOps, vector databases, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines - skills that are in incredibly high demand. If you are passionate about shaping the future of AI and thrive on complex, high-impact challenges, we encourage you to apply.

As a Senior Data Engineer for AI/ML, you will be the architect and builder of the data infrastructure that feeds our intelligent systems. Your responsibilities will include:

• Design and Build Scalable Data Pipelines: Architect, implement, and optimize robust, high-performance real-time and batch ETL pipelines to ingest, process, and transform massive datasets for LLMs and foundational AI models.
• Cloud-Native Innovation: Leverage your deep expertise across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP to build cloud-native data solutions, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Power Generative AI: Develop and manage specialized data flows for generative AI applications, including integrating with vector databases and constructing sophisticated RAG pipelines.
• Champion Data Governance & Ethical AI: Implement best practices for data quality, lineage, privacy, and security, ensuring our AI systems are developed and used responsibly and ethically.
• Tooling the Future: Get hands-on with cutting-edge technologies like Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, and other modern data and ML frameworks.
• Collaborate and Lead: Partner closely with ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and Researchers to understand their data needs, provide technical leadership, and translate complex requirements into actionable data strategies.
• Optimize and Operate: Monitor, troubleshoot, and continuously optimize data pipelines and infrastructure for peak performance and reliability in production environments.

We are seeking a seasoned professional who is excited by the unique challenges of AI data.

What are we looking for?

Must-Have Skills:

• Extensive Data Engineering Experience: Proven track record (3+ years) in designing, building, and maintaining large-scale data pipelines and data warehousing solutions.
• Cloud Platform Mastery: Expert-level proficiency with at least one major cloud provider (GCP-Preffered, AWS, or Azure), including their data, compute, and storage services.
• Programming Prowess: Strong programming skills in Python and SQL are essential.
• Big Data Ecosystem Expertise: Hands-on experience with big data technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, and data orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow or Prefect.
• ML Data Acumen: Solid understanding of data requirements for machine learning models, including feature engineering, data validation, and dataset versioning.
• Vector Database Experience: Practical experience working with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma) for embedding storage and retrieval.
• Generative AI Familiarity: Understanding of data paradigms for LLMs, RAG architectures, and how data pipelines support fine-tuning or pre-training.
• MLOps Principles: Familiarity with MLOps best practices for deploying and managing ML models in production.
• Data Governance & Ethics: Experience implementing data governance frameworks, ensuring data quality, privacy, and compliance, with an awareness of ethical AI considerations.

Bonus Points If You Have:

• Direct experience with Hugging Face ecosystem, PyTorch, or TensorFlow for data preparation in an ML context.
• Experience with real-time data streaming architectures.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related quantitative field.

Starcom has fantastic benefits on offer to all of our employees. In addition to the classics, Pension, Life Assurance, Private Medical and Income Protection Planswe also offer;

• WORK YOUR WORLD opportunity to work anywhere in the world, where there is a Publicis office, for up to 6 weeks a year.
• REFLECTION DAYS - Two additional days of paid leave to step away from your usual day-to-day work and create time to focus on your well-being and self-care.
• HELP@HAND BENEFITS 24/7 helpline to support you on a personal and professional level. Access to remote GPs, mental health support and CBT. Wellbeing content and lifestyle coaching.
• FAMILY FRIENDLY POLICIES We provide 26 weeks of full pay for the following family milestones: Maternity. Adoption, Surrogacy and Shared Parental Leave.
• FLEXIBLE WORKING, BANK HOLIDAY SWAP & BIRTHDAY DAY OFF You are entitled to an additional day off for your birthday, from your first day of employment.
• GREAT LOCAL DISCOUNTS This includes membership discounts with Soho Friends, local restaurants and retailers in Westfield White City and Television Centre.

Full details of our benefits will be shared when you join us!

Publicis Groupe operates a hybrid working pattern with full time employees being office-based three days during the working week.

We are supportive of all candidates and are committed to providing a fair assessment process. If you have any circumstances (such as neurodiversity, physical or mental impairments or a medical condition) that may affect your assessment, please inform your Talent Acquisition Partner. We will discuss possible adjustments to ensure fairness. Rest assured, disclosing this information will not impact your treatment in our process.

Please make sure you check out the Publicis Career Page which showcases our Inclusive Benefits and our EAG's (Employee Action Groups).

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