Data Engineer

Tesla’s Manufacturing Quality team is hiring a Data Engineer to help vehicle teams make evidence-based quality decisions. This role combines data engineering with full-stack application work and AI agent development to automate defect analysis and speed up root-cause investigations in a high-volume manufacturing environment.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipeline architecture while advancing automation and standardization across ETL/ELT processes
• Drive process improvements such as automating manual workflows, optimizing queries, and redesigning infrastructure for reliability and scale
• Design and develop full-stack web applications for defect analysis and investigation, including backend services, REST APIs, access control, and frontend interfaces
• Develop AI agents and retrieval systems to automate quality workflows and generate preliminary root-cause investigations for engineering review
• Evaluate agent performance for accuracy, groundedness, and the ability to hand off to engineering review appropriately
• Create visualizations, dashboards, and reports using Tableau, React, or Grafana to track key metrics and inform decisions
• Lead end-to-end analyses, from requirements gathering through data processing, modeling, statistical analysis, and root-cause investigation of system and metric changes

Location and role context

This position is onsite in Austin, TX with the Manufacturing Quality team.

What you’ll bring

• A degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or an engineering discipline, or equivalent experience
• 2+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, or a related field
• Proficiency in Python and SQL
• Experience building and operating production ETL pipelines with Apache Airflow or an equivalent orchestration tool
• Experience in full-stack application development, including backend services and frontend interfaces, preferably with React
• Hands-on experience developing AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, including tool calling, orchestration, embeddings, vector stores, and evaluation of output quality
• Experience building analytical dashboards using Streamlit, Grafana, Tableau, Power BI, or similar tools
• Experience with Git, code review, and CI/CD
• Experience with multiple data architecture paradigms (SQL, NoSQL, Kafka, Spark) and data communication protocols (REST, WebSocket)
• Experience deploying and operating production services on Kubernetes

Technologies you’ll use

• Python, SQL, Apache Airflow
• React, Tableau, Grafana, Streamlit, Power BI
• Git, CI/CD
• NoSQL, Kafka, Spark
• REST APIs, WebSocket
• Kubernetes, ETL/ELT
• RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector stores
• Tool calling

Benefits

• Medical plans with more than plan options, including $0 payroll deduction
• Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits
• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both with options for $0 paycheck contribution
• Company-paid HSA contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA
• Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
• Company paid Basic Life and AD&D
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance with a 90 day waiting period
• Employee Assistance Program
• Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions) and Paid Holidays
• Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
• Voluntary benefits including critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
• Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
• Teslа Babies program
• Commuter benefits
• Employee discounts and perks program

What to expect

• Support quality engineering initiatives on site
• Enable vehicle engineers to improve vehicle quality with data models, pipelines, and workflows for cross-functional teams
• Develop full-stack applications and AI agents to automate defect analysis and root-cause investigations, helping quality engineers resolve issues faster with stronger evidence
• Work directly with quality, process, and design engineers in a high-volume manufacturing environment
• Bring a rigorous problem-solving approach and a quality and customer-focused mindset