Principal Software Engineer, AI Data Engineering

Location: Lisbon, Portugal / Krakow, Poland

Working Pattern: Fully Remote (Portugal); Hybrid (Poland)

Join our AI Delivery & Engineering team and provide principal-level technical leadership for reusable enterprise AI data and grounding capabilities. You'll help ensure AI solutions use secure, scalable, reliable and well-governed data foundations.

Impact You'll Own

• Define data engineering standards for reusable AI data and grounding capabilities.
• Strengthen solution quality through reviews of supplier designs, code, schemas, transformations and evidence.
• Guide decisions on data sources, retrieval relevance, freshness, quality, cost and latency.
• Improve traceability, permissions, lifecycle controls and readiness across shared assets and AI solutions.
• Align data standards, dependencies and ownership boundaries across engineering and data teams.

What You'll Do

• Define standards for data contracts, ingestion, transformation, indexing, grounding and refresh patterns.
• Review supplier pipelines, code, schemas, retrieval configurations, lineage and quality evidence.
• Assess source suitability, freshness, retrieval relevance and downstream AI behavior.
• Set expectations for permissions, access controls, retention and deletion across sources, indexes and caches.
• Partner with Quality and Testing to assess completeness, validity, provenance and reproducibility.
• Review readiness for schema changes, refresh failures, recoverability and operational handover.
• Turn findings and incidents into improved standards, guidance and reference patterns.

Skills And Capabilities

Must-haves

• Degree in Computer Science, IT, Software Engineering or a related discipline.
• Enterprise software engineering experience in cloud-native and distributed systems.
• Hands-on enterprise AI data engineering, grounding and retrieval experience.
• Knowledge of data pipelines, contracts, schemas, lineage, provenance, metadata and quality controls.
• Experience with ingestion, indexing, chunking, embedding, retrieval and refresh patterns.
• Ability to assess relevance, freshness, scalability, latency, cost and access-control trade-offs.
• Experience with batch and streaming architectures, observability and recoverability.
• Strong secure software development, CI/CD, testing and production-readiness foundations.
• Proven technical leadership through standards, reviews, supplier assurance and remediation.
• Strong communication, cross-team influence, mentoring and documentation skills.

Nice-to-have

• Advanced study in AI/ML, distributed systems or cloud/platform engineering.

Rewards and Benefits

Permanent local contract with a competitive salary plus Tabaqueira employee benefits including:

• Life and Health insurance
• Employee Pension Plan
• 26 holiday days
• National and international growth opportunities
• Diverse and international work environment

For Poland: In this position, you will earn no less than 327660 PLN gross per year.

Equal Opportunities Statement

We believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us stronger. As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to creating a workplace where every individual feels welcomed, respected, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential.

We encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and identities, and provide reasonable accommodations to ensure an accessible recruitment process. If you need support or adjustments during your application, let us know. We're here to help you succeed.

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