Associate Data Engineer, Enterprise Data Engineering

Job Posting Organization:
The World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), is a global organization dedicated to addressing the world's most pressing development challenges. Established to reduce poverty and promote shared prosperity, the World Bank operates in over 145 countries with more than 182 offices worldwide. The organization focuses on investing in people, strengthening markets, and delivering scalable, data-driven solutions to create better jobs and improve lives. The World Bank is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce that reflects the communities it serves, and it actively collaborates with governments, private sector partners, and development stakeholders to achieve its mission.

Job Overview:
The Associate Data Engineer position within the World Bank's Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) is crucial for enabling the organization to fulfill its mission of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. This role involves working with a diverse team to deliver transformative information and technologies that support the Bank's operations across more than 150 locations. The ITS Data Office (ITSDO) is responsible for advancing the Bank's digital transformation by enabling data, AI, information, and knowledge capabilities. The Associate Data Engineer will focus on designing and building scalable ingestion and processing pipelines for unstructured data, implementing document processing workflows, and developing multimodal processing capabilities. The role requires collaboration with data architects, AI engineers, and business teams to translate requirements into reliable data products, contributing to code reviews, and establishing engineering standards.

Duties and Responsibilities:
The Associate Data Engineer will be responsible for designing and building scalable ingestion and processing pipelines for unstructured content, including PDFs, audio, video, and images. Key duties include implementing document processing workflows that cover OCR, metadata extraction, content enrichment, and chunking strategies to support retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions. The engineer will develop multimodal processing capabilities that handle diverse source formats consistently and at scale, as well as build and maintain embedding, retrieval, and re-ranking pipelines integrated with enterprise search and AI platforms. Additionally, the engineer will create a library of reusable pipeline templates and standardized deployment configurations, document reference architectures, and contribute to collaborative efforts with data architects and business teams to ensure the successful delivery of data products.

Required Qualifications:
Candidates must demonstrate experience leading technical teams in a hands-on capacity, with the ability to set direction and unblock teams. A proven ability to design end-to-end data and AI architectures and communicate them effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences is essential. Experience managing vendor relationships, translating strategic requirements into technical designs, and a strong background in data engineering focused on unstructured data processing and AI/search use cases are required. Hands-on expertise with Databricks, Google Cloud Platform, and BigQuery is necessary, along with familiarity with multimodal content processing and DevOps practices such as CI/CD and automated testing.

Educational Background:
Typically, candidates should possess a Master's degree with at least 5 years of relevant experience or a Bachelor's degree with a minimum of 7 years of experience in data platform operations, cloud operations, SRE, DevOps, DataOps, or platform engineering disciplines. Relevant certifications such as SAFe or other Agile certifications, as well as Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate or equivalent, are preferred.

Experience:
The position requires 5-10 years of experience in relevant fields, including data platform operations, cloud operations, SRE, DevOps, DataOps, and production support. Candidates should have a strong track record of working in environments that emphasize Agile methodologies and collaborative delivery.

Languages:
The mandatory language for this position is English. While no additional languages are specified as preferred, proficiency in other languages may be beneficial in a diverse workplace.

Additional Notes:
This position is part of local recruitment efforts and does not specify a contract duration. The role is full-time and offers a competitive compensation package, including comprehensive benefits such as a retirement plan, medical, life and disability insurance, paid leave, and reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. The World Bank is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity in its workforce.