Who we are:
At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.
Our values:
- Listen first • We are experts in product practices but lifelong learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.
- Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.
- Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.
We're looking for a Data Engineer to build the data foundation behind an enterprise AI platform for a global enterprise client. Agents and LLM applications are only as good as the data they can reach, and you'll own getting it there: clean, governed, and ready for retrieval. Most of your work will be in Databricks, with a strong lean toward AI use cases.
Key Responsibilities:
Data Pipelines & Platform
- Design and build batch and streaming pipelines in Databricks (Spark, Delta Lake, Workflows)
- Model data in a lakehouse architecture that serves both analytics and AI workloads
- Implement governance and access controls with Unity Catalog
- Monitor data quality and pipeline reliability
Data for AI
- Build ingestion and chunking pipelines for unstructured data (documents, PDFs, knowledge bases) that feed RAG systems
- Generate, store, and refresh embeddings; operate vector search (Databricks Vector Search or similar)
- Build datasets for LLM evaluation and help teams measure retrieval quality
- Partner with AI and platform engineers so agents get the right data with the right permissions
Cloud & Engineering Practices
- Deploy data infrastructure on Azure and/or GCP using IaC
- Bring software engineering habits to data work: version control, testing, CI/CD
Required Qualifications:
- 5+ years in data engineering
- Strong hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake
- Proficiency in Python and SQL
- Experience building production data pipelines in a cloud environment (Azure or GCP preferred)
- Experience with data modeling and data quality practices
Preferred Qualifications (Exceptional Candidates):
- Experience building data pipelines for RAG, embeddings, or vector search
- Experience with Unity Catalog and Mosaic AI
- Experience with streaming (Structured Streaming, Kafka, Event Hubs)
- Consulting or client-facing experience
What Sets Exceptional Candidates Apart:
- You've improved an AI system's answers by fixing the data underneath it
- You've handled messy unstructured data at scale
- Databricks certifications or open-source contributions
What to know before you apply:
- This role will require being in the Chicago office 3 days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States.
- Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time.
- The Chicago base salary range for this role is $145,000 - $175,000.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering
- Strong hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake
- Proficiency in Python and SQL
- Experience building production data pipelines in a cloud environment, preferably Azure or GCP
- Experience with data modeling and data quality practices
- Experience building data pipelines for RAG, embeddings, or vector search
- Experience with Unity Catalog and Mosaic AI
- Experience with streaming technologies such as Structured Streaming, Kafka, or Event Hubs
- Consulting or client-facing experience
- Databricks certifications or open-source contributions
Focused Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Focused and has not been reviewed or approved by Focused.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid leave is offered for both birth and non-birth parents, with a structured transition period to ease the return to work. Adoption assistance and company-sponsored family events reinforce a family-friendly environment.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) plan includes employer matching with no vesting period, supporting long-term savings. The presence of a clear match structure signals a stable retirement benefit.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO combines vacation, sick days, and floating holidays to support work-life balance. Company materials emphasize using time off and taking breaks to maintain wellbeing.
Focused Insights
What We Do
Focused is a software services company that builds agentic AI and custom software. Our expert engineers and designers build custom agents that integrate seamlessly with the systems you already run. What sets Focused apart is our hands-on, collaborative approach. We don’t just build and deliver software, we partner with your teams to ensure that we are building the right solution to meet both present and future demands.
Why Work With Us
We love to write code, and if you do too, you will love Focused. Everything we do from our sustainable pace to minimal meetings is designed to optimize your time writing software! Focused is truly a place to grow or hone your software craft - you could see 2-3 clients in a year and each one presents things to learn.
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