Data Engineer

UL Research Institutes is seeking a Data Engineer for an onsite role in Skokie, Illinois. This position focuses on delivering data pipelines, data models, and data platforms that support analytics and machine learning for Materials Discovery.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and technical implementation of MDRI’s data platforms, making trade-off decisions across scalability, performance, cost, security, and reliability.
• Set and enforce standards and best practices for data modeling, pipeline design, documentation, data quality, and reproducibility, including automated data quality checks and validation processes.
• Design, build, and evolve data architectures and ETL/ELT pipelines to collect, process, and store data from diverse sources such as laboratory systems, databases, APIs, and external data providers, ensuring accuracy, completeness, reproducibility, and timeliness.
• Evaluate and introduce modern data technologies and patterns, including cloud-native services, orchestration frameworks, and feature-ready datasets, aligned with Materials Discovery’s current and future needs while addressing scaling risks and performance bottlenecks.
• Integrate disparate data sources into unified, high-quality datasets and ensure data governance, security, and compliance with institutional standards and applicable regulations.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation, contributing to data dictionaries and metadata repositories to support long-term platform sustainability.
• Collaborate with researchers and stakeholders to define effective data and modeling approaches for research, operational, and business challenges.
• Assess and justify modeling techniques, perform exploratory data analysis and feature engineering, and develop, train, and evaluate machine learning and statistical models to establish feasibility, baselines, and data requirements.
• Document assumptions, inputs, outputs, limitations, and evaluation results, and hand off validated models, feature sets, and supporting documentation for deployment and operationalization.
• Serve as a technical partner and advisor on data architecture, analytical feasibility, and strategic trade-offs, influencing cross-functional planning and technical direction.
• Troubleshoot complex data and model issues across development and production environments.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience owning and evolving data platforms or systems end-to-end.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python, including experience with data analysis and machine learning libraries such as pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.
• Experience with cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, along with related data and analytics services.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and containerization technologies such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with data integration, orchestration, and distributed processing frameworks such as Apache Spark, Azure Databricks, and Azure Data Factory.
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals, feature engineering, evaluation techniques, and experiment reproducibility.
• Knowledge of data governance, security, privacy, and compliance best practices.
• Strong communication, problem-solving, and technical judgment skills, including the ability to tailor messaging for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Technologies

• SQL, Python, pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn
• PyTorch, TensorFlow
• Azure, AWS, Google Cloud
• Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes
• Apache Spark
• Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory
• ETL/ELT

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Science, Engineering, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Minimum 4 years of experience in a data engineering, analytics engineering, or closely related role.

Compensation

Salary range: USD 81,456 - 112,002 per yearly. Pay type: Salary.

Benefits

• Bonus compensation eligibility
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans
• 401k matching structure of up to 5% of eligible pay
• Additional 4% into your retirement saving fund after your first year of continuous employment
• Flexible working arrangements may be available depending on role
• Paid time off, including vacation, holiday, sick, and volunteer days

Work Location and Role Type

Onsite role based in the Skokie, Illinois office.