Senior Software Engineer, Data Processing

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate ingestion systems that process large volumes of multimodal data into structured, AI-ready datasets
• Own the end-to-end ingestion path, including data validation, processing, tracking, and downstream availability
• Build modality-specific processing steps for imaging, audio, video, and other unstructured data formats
• Develop parsers, validators, and normalization logic to handle messy and high-variance source data
• Optimize systems for high throughput, reliability, and cost-efficiency using distributed and parallel compute
• Implement rigorous data quality checks and security protocols to handle sensitive and regulated data (e.g., PHI)
• Partner with Product and Data Lab teams to standardize reusable processing patterns and internal tooling

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend or data systems
• Proven experience designing and running large-scale data pipelines
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience with distributed data processing
• Strong proficiency with AWS
• Ability to thrive in high-ambiguity environments with messy, high-volume data

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience processing specific modalities such as medical imaging (DICOM), text, audio, or video
• Background working with regulated data environments (HIPAA, healthcare compliance, PHI)
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools like Airflow or Dagster
• Experience with GCP or Azure
• Prior experience as an early engineer in a startup environment
• Familiarity with ML, NLP, or LLM-based systems, including embeddings and fine-tuning

About the Company

Protege is building a platform to solve AI's biggest unmet need: access to high-quality training data. We facilitate the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data, connecting organizations with high-value data to the AI builders who need it. We are a lean, fast-moving team of builders obsessed with velocity and impact.