Forward Deployed Engineer Co-op - Data De-Identification at Tonic · LumiJobs

Qualification

Hands-on work in data engineeringAI-native workflowSelf-directionExperience with model inferenceWhat Success Looks LikeIn your first month

A bachelor's degree in a technical field (computer science, engineering, math, statistics, physics, bioinformatics, or similar), or currently enrolled in one.
Hands-on work in data engineering, backend engineering, or a solutions/forward-deployed role where you shipped production systems for customers. Internships, co-ops, research, and substantial projects count.
Strong experience in Python and other backend programming languages, plus SQL. Comfortable reading and debugging other people's code.
Experience building repeatable pipelines that process large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. You understand how data flows through a system and can tell when output is wrong.
AI-native workflow. AI tools and agents are central to how you work, not an add-on. You know where they're reliable, where they need your oversight, and you don't trust their output without checking it.
Self-direction. You'll often be the only engineer on an engagement, and you'll need to make sound calls without waiting for someone to tell you what to do.
Clear communication with very different audiences. You can walk a client's engineer through a pipeline failure in the morning and explain a tradeoff to a senior executive in the afternoon.
A record of delivering complex projects on short timelines, measured in days and weeks.
Availability for roughly 20 hours a week, with enough flexibility to keep client engagements on schedule.

Experience with model inference, ML pipelines, or PyTorch.
Experience building or maintaining data masking, de-identification, ETL or synthetic data tooling.
Interest in working close to frontier AI labs and the training-data ecosystem.
Experience at an early-stage company or on a new product line.
What Success Looks Like
In your first month, you'll learn the platform and the delivery process and run part of a live engagement alongside the team. By the end of your first quarter, you'll be running engagements on your own, from scoping to delivery, and the runbooks and tooling you've written will have made the second and third ones faster than the first. After that, you'll help shape how this function grows.
You'll be early in a fast-growing business solving a problem the AI industry doesn't yet have a good answer for.
You'll work alongside technical founders, with a direct line from what you see in the field to what gets built.

Forward Deployed Engineer Co-op - Data De-Identification