Senior Data Engineer

About the role

Kavak stands as the first Mexican unicorn company, establishing a strong presence across several countries in Latin America with an AI-first business model that is fundamentally redefining the used car market and the experience of millions of users throughout the region. As a Senior Data Engineer, you will join a team that builds artificial intelligence directly into core operations, spanning conversational commerce platforms, generative marketing systems, and sophisticated infrastructure that extracts actionable insights from millions of user interactions every day. This role sits within a hypergrowth organization that recently closed a USD $300M investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz, representing one of the largest investments ever made in Latin America. You will play a key part in bringing the next chapter of their product to the next level by advancing AI-driven efforts across the entire organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design and maintain data pipelines that support AI-first operations across multiple business functions and product teams within the organization
• Build and optimize data infrastructure for systems that process millions of user interactions every single day at scale
• Collaborate closely with teams working on conversational commerce platforms and generative marketing systems to deliver data solutions
• Ensure high data quality and reliability for insights extraction from large-scale user engagement data across all markets
• Develop scalable and resilient data solutions that power the company's AI initiatives in core operational workflows
• Work with cross-functional teams to understand data requirements and deliver measurable, relevant results that drive business decisions
• Implement best practices for data governance, security standards, and compliance across all distributed systems and environments
• Contribute directly to the company's hypergrowth by building strong data foundations that support rapid expansion and new markets
• Mentor junior engineers and actively share technical knowledge across the broader data engineering and analytics teams
• Participate in architectural decisions that shape the company's overall data ecosystem and long-term technical strategy
• Own end-to-end data lifecycle management from ingestion and transformation through storage, serving, and retirement of datasets
• Partner with product and engineering teams to define data models that enable real-time and batch analytics use cases

Requirements

• Experience building and managing complex data pipelines at scale in a production environment with proven reliability
• Strong understanding of data modeling, schema design, and both relational and non-relational database architecture principles
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced hypergrowth setting with shifting priorities, ambiguity, and tight deadlines
• Commitment to delivering measurable impact through data-driven solutions, experimentation, and continuous improvement practices across teams
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams in a distributed, multi-country organization spanning multiple Latin American markets
• Strong problem-solving skills and a deep sense of ownership for project outcomes, deliverables, and production reliability
• Familiarity with AI and machine learning workflows, including training pipelines, feature stores, and model deployment processes
• Excellent communication skills for aligning technical work with business objectives, goals, and diverse stakeholder needs
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize competing demands and make timely decisions without compromising data quality standards
• Track record of raising the bar using technology and data to generate measurable, relevant results consistently

Nice to have

• Experience with generative AI applications and large language model integration in production environments at scale
• Background in e-commerce or marketplace platforms serving millions of active users across multiple geographic regions
• Knowledge of real-time data processing, event streaming architectures, and micro-batch computation frameworks for analytics
• Exposure to conversational AI systems, natural language processing pipelines, and dialogue management workflows in production
• Understanding of data privacy regulations and compliance requirements specific to Latin American markets and jurisdictions
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and tools for managing machine learning models in production environments

Skills & tools

• Data pipeline design and orchestration frameworks for both batch and streaming data workloads
• Cloud-based data warehousing and storage solutions optimized for large-scale analytics and reporting
• SQL and general-purpose programming languages for data transformation, engineering, and automation tasks
• Monitoring and observability tools for tracking data infrastructure health, performance, and availability metrics
• Version control systems and CI/CD practices for automating data workflow testing and deployment
• Data quality testing frameworks, validation tools, and metadata management platforms for governance
• Experience with distributed computing frameworks and parallel processing for large-scale data transformations
• Knowledge of data cataloging and lineage tools for maintaining transparency across data assets

Practical notes

• This position is based in Mexico City and requires on-site presence at the company office on a regular basis
• Kavak operates across several countries in Latin America, offering opportunities for regional collaboration and cross-border team projects
• The company recently secured USD $300M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, signaling a strong growth trajectory ahead
• Kavak values include delivering measurable impact, acting quickly on problems and opportunities, taking extreme ownership, and prioritizing collective team results
• The organization is the first Mexican unicorn and has been one of the best valued companies in the region
• This is a full-time role with a hypergrowth environment that demands proactivity, ambition, and comfort with rapid change