Bank of America Corporation

Principal Engineer - Data Ingestion & AI Pipeline

Bank of America Corporation$120K — $160K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in software, data, platform, or AI engineering.
  • 5+ years of experience designing large-scale enterprise systems.
  • 2+ years working with LLM, RAG, or AI platform capabilities.
  • Strong background in ETL/ELT, streaming, and batch processing.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms like Azure Data Factory or Databricks.

Responsibilities

  • Develops engineering strategies for program/portfolio solutions.
  • Leads planning and design of complex, multi-team features.
  • Implements technology design and solution development approaches.
  • Oversees technical development and design reviews across teams.
  • Defines and selects technology stacks for solutions.
  • Implements test strategies and integration across teams for solutions.
  • Designs and leads data ingestion pipelines for various data types.

Benefits

  • Collaboration with cutting-edge technologies and innovations.
  • Influence and leadership across multiple engineering teams.
  • Opportunity to mentor and develop senior engineers.
  • Strong focus on data governance and compliance within projects.
  • Structured approach to delivering high-quality enterprise solutions.
Full Job Description
Job Description:

This job is responsible for defining and leading the engineering approach for solutions at the program or portfolio level, to deliver significant business outcomes. Key responsibilities include continuously improving the design, quality, and reuse of the solution and delivering technology enablers that improve development efficiencies for the solution. Job expectations include familiarity with at least one area of engineering, acting as a "go to" reference across the organization, and applying knowledge to improve technical competencies through recruitment and development activities.

Developer Experience (DevEx) provides enterprise technical standards and common technical services, platforms, and tools that are leveraged by delivery teams across all lines of business. Within the SDLC Software Delivery Lifecycle program, this role leads portfolio product delivery strategy and execution for enterprise software delivery capabilities, ensuring the right investments, operating model, governance, and prioritization are in place to improve how internal technical users build, test, and deliver software at scale.

The Data Ingestion & AI Pipeline Principal Engineer is responsible for designing and leading the engineering of scalable ingestion pipelines that prepare enterprise data for RAG and AI workloads. This role focuses on extracting, transforming, enriching, validating, chunking, classifying, and loading structured and unstructured data into downstream RAG databases.

This engineer ensures that source data becomes clean, traceable, secure, current, and optimized for retrieval and LLM consumption.

Responsibilities:

  • Develops the engineering approach for the entire program/portfolio solution and works with Architecture, to develop/analyze/deliver the implementation of technical enablers
  • Leads the planning, definition, and design of the complex features which span multiple teams and explore solution alternatives
  • Creates ideas on designing complex technology and solution development approaches
  • Leads the technical oversight for teams in solution development including design reviews and code within own domain
  • Defines the technology tool stack for the solution within ranged of internally approved and supported technologies
  • Explores state-of-the-art technologies to improve development efficiencies, quality of test/QA coverage, and release management
  • Leads and is responsible for the end-to-end test strategy/creation/adherence, and the integration between teams for a program/portfolio solution
  • Improve the experience for our developers, making it easier to deliver industry-leading solutions, while managing work efficiently and with the right controls
  • Advance our technology platforms through innovation
  • Reduce risk and improve quality across our technology portfolio by aligning to a single enterprise architecture strategy and delivering governance that enables consistency, integration and automation
  • Design and lead enterprise data ingestion pipelines for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
  • Build scalable ingestion patterns for sources such as databases, APIs, documents, PDFs, SharePoint, file shares, data lakes, wikis, ticketing systems, code repositories, emails, and application logs.
  • Define transformation patterns for document parsing, text extraction, normalization, deduplication, enrichment, chunking, classification, and metadata generation.
  • Establish ingestion standards for source lineage, data freshness, versioning, access controls, and auditability.
  • Implement pipeline orchestration, monitoring, retry logic, error handling, and operational dashboards.
  • Design incremental ingestion, change detection, delta processing, and reprocessing strategies.
  • Partner with RAG database engineers to ensure ingested data is optimized for embedding, indexing, and retrieval.
  • Partner with context engineers to ensure data is structured and enriched in ways that support effective LLM reasoning.
  • Evaluate and implement OCR, document intelligence, parsing, entity extraction, content classification, and data quality capabilities.
  • Define data quality checks for completeness, accuracy, duplication, stale content, unsupported formats, and sensitive information.
  • Ensure ingestion pipelines comply with security, privacy, retention, and regulatory requirements.
  • Provide technical leadership across data engineering, AI platform, cloud, and application teams.
  • Serve as a senior technical authority for enterprise AI platform engineering.
  • Own architecture decisions that impact multiple teams, systems, or domains.
  • Create reusable patterns, reference architectures, standards, and engineering guardrails.
  • Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction without requiring direct reporting authority.
  • Balance innovation with operational reliability, security, compliance, scalability, and cost management.
  • Communicate complex AI and data engineering concepts clearly to engineering, product, risk, security, and executive stakeholders.


Required Qualification:

  • 10+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or AI engineering experience.
  • 5+ years designing large-scale enterprise systems.
  • 2+ years working with LLM, RAG, vector search, semantic search, or AI platform capabilities.
  • Extensive experience designing and operating production-grade data pipelines.
  • Strong understanding of ETL/ELT, streaming, batch processing, orchestration, and data quality engineering.
  • Experience ingesting and processing structured and unstructured enterprise content.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms and pipeline technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks, Fabric, Spark, Kafka, Event Hubs, Airflow, dbt, or equivalent.
  • Experience with document processing, OCR, schema inference, parsing, content extraction, and metadata enrichment.
  • Understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, and LLM-oriented data preparation.
  • Strong knowledge of data governance, lineage, access control propagation, and enterprise security patterns.
  • Proven ability to design reusable engineering frameworks and standards.
  • Proven ability to lead architecture across multiple engineering teams.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • Experience operating systems in regulated, security-conscious, or enterprise-scale environments.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field


Desired Qualifications:
  • Experience with Azure AI Document Intelligence, Microsoft Graph, SharePoint ingestion, Purview, or enterprise content management systems.
  • Experience with large-scale data lakehouse architectures.
  • Experience with semantic chunking, entity extraction, taxonomy generation, or knowledge graph creation.
  • Experience with sensitive data detection, PII handling, DLP, and compliance-aware ingestion.
  • Reliable ingestion pipelines that continuously feed high-quality enterprise knowledge into RAG systems.
  • Reduced manual data preparation and improved automation of content onboarding.
  • Strong lineage, governance, and access-control-aware ingestion patterns.
  • Faster time-to-ingest for new enterprise data sources.
  • Improved downstream retrieval and LLM response quality through better data preparation.
  • Enterprise architecture
  • Distributed systems design
  • AI platform engineering
  • Data governance and security
  • Cloud-native engineering
  • Observability and operational excellence
  • Technical strategy and roadmap development
  • Cross-functional influence
  • Vendor and platform evaluation
  • Production support and continuous improvement


Skills:
  • Automation
  • Influence
  • Result Orientation
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Technical Strategy Development
  • Application Development
  • Architecture
  • Business Acumen
  • Risk Management
  • Solution Design
  • Agile Practices
  • Analytical Thinking
  • Collaboration
  • Data Management
  • Solution Delivery Process


Shift:
1st shift (United States of America)

Hours Per Week:
40

About Bank of America Corporation

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is the corporate and investment banking division of Bank of America. It provides services in mergers and acquisitions, equity and debt capital markets, lending, trading, risk management, research, and liquidity and payments management. It was formed through the combination of the corporate and investment banking activities of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch following the acquisition of the latter by the former in January 2009. Bank of America completed the acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co on 1 January 2009. Bank of America began rebranding all of its corporate and investment banking activities under the Bank of America Merrill Lynch name in September 2009. In April 2010, Bank of America Merrill Lynch appointed Christian Meissner as head of investment banking for Europe, Middle East and Africa. In April 2011, Bank of America Merrill Lynch integrated its corporate and investment banking operations into a single division. In October 2013, Bank of America Merrill Lynch was recognised as the Most Innovative Investment Bank of the Year in The Banker's Investment Banking Awards.

Bank of America Corporation Careers

Join the dynamic team at Bank of America Corporation, a premier global financial institution where innovation, leadership, and growth go hand in hand. As one of the largest banks in the world, we offer unparalleled job opportunities and a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and professional growth. Work You’ll Do At Bank of America Corporation, you’ll be part of a team that’s dedicated to making a real difference. Whether you’re helping families buy their first home, advising businesses on expansion, or developing cutting-edge financial technologies, your work will have an impact. Our commitment to leadership in the financial industry has never been stronger, and we need passionate, skilled professionals to lead our journey. Explore a World of Opportunities From entry-level positions to leadership roles, Bank of America Corporation offers a variety of career paths in areas such as investment banking, technology, marketing, and risk management. Our job opportunities span the globe, providing the chance to work alongside the best in the industry and develop skills that will propel your career forward. Internship Programs Kickstart your career with Bank of America Corporation’s internship programs. These opportunities provide hands-on experience and a chance to engage in meaningful work that complements your academic studies. Interns gain invaluable networking opportunities, receive mentorship from seasoned professionals, and learn about the culture and operations of a global financial leader. Benefits and Growth Bank of America Corporation is committed to the well-being and continuous professional development of our team members. We offer a competitive benefits package that supports the health, financial stability, and work-life balance of our employees. Our training programs and development initiatives ensure that every team member has the opportunity to grow and advance within the company. Inclusive Culture We believe our strength lies in our diversity. Bank of America Corporation fosters an inclusive environment where all employees can thrive. Through diversity training and a commitment to equal opportunities, we cultivate leadership and innovation that reflect the wide-ranging communities we serve. Join Our Team Are you ready to advance your career at a company that’s at the forefront of the financial industry? Explore the positions available at Bank of America Corporation and find where your skills and interests align with our needs. We are continuously hiring and looking for individuals who are curious, creative, and eager to drive change. Stay Connected Keep up to date with the latest from Bank of America Corporation Careers by subscribing to our job alert emails. Tailor your subscription to receive updates that match your career interests and get insider tips that can help you during your application and interview process. Bank of America Corporation is not just a company—it’s a place where you can shape your future and the future of finance. Join us and be part of a team that’s redefining what a bank can be.
Learn more about Bank of America Corporation
Size
208,000 employees
Market Cap
$260.3 billion
Industry
Net Income
$17.8 billion
Founded
1998
5 Year Trend
-1.4%
NASDAQ

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