Open role
Data Engineer
This is contract work, scoped per engagement, and it is deliberately not a permanent seat.
Every build stalls in the same place, and this is that place.
- Employment
- Contract, scoped per engagement.
- Location
- Remote, 100%. We can only hire in the United States.
- Travel
- No travel.
- Reports to
- Alex, CTO.
- Salary
- Not published yet. Ask in your first email and we will give you the range before you spend any more time on us.
What the work actually is
A $5M company's history sits in five systems. Two of them export cleanly. One exports something that claims to be CSV. One has an admin panel and no API. One is a shared drive with nine years of quotes in it, named by whoever saved them. Nothing we build works until that history is out and usable, and this is the part that consistently takes longer than the model work.
You get it out, you get it into a shape we can train on and measure against, and you tell us plainly when a dataset is not good enough to build on. That last part matters more than the first two. We would rather hear it in week one than find out in testing.
What you would be doing
- Pull the client's history out of whatever it lives in, including the systems with no export worth the name.
- Clean and label enough of it that we can measure whether a system is getting the answer right.
- Build the pipeline that keeps it flowing after go-live, and document what will break and roughly when.
- Say when the data will not support what the assessment promised.
What we are looking for
- You have got data out of a system that did not want to give it to you, and you were not precious about how.
- Python and SQL. Beyond that we do not have opinions.
- You have worked with small company data, which means dirty, inconsistent, and entered by a human in a hurry.
- You are available for a defined block of weeks rather than a permanent role.
What we are not looking for
- Anyone who needs a warehouse to already exist.
- Anyone who wants to spend the engagement choosing tools.
- Full time candidates. This is contract by design, and we will say so again on the call.
Who should not apply
Do not apply if the phrase nine years of quotes on a shared drive made you close the tab. That is the job.
Do not apply if you are outside the United States. We would like to say otherwise, but we can only hire and contract there at the moment, so an application from anywhere else is one we have to turn down on paperwork rather than on merit. We would rather you knew that before you wrote it than after.
How to apply
Email us with your CV attached, your day rate, and the worst export you have ever had to deal with.
Tell us how you got it out and what you had to give up to do it.
Send it to careers@elevencloud.ai with your CV attached. There is no form and no portal. One of us reads it, and you get an answer either way.
Apply for Data EngineerThis role is open as of 2026-08-22 and this page comes down when it is filled. If you are reading it after 2026-11-20 and it is still here, email us anyway and tell us.
What happens after you send it
No day counts against the steps. We have not agreed a response window we would keep, and a missed promise is worse than a missing one.
You email us
CV attached, plus the answer to the question at the bottom of the role page. We read the answer before the CV.
We reply either way
Including when the answer is no, and we give the reason in a sentence. Nobody here is left to work it out from silence.
One call
About 45 minutes, with Alex, CTO.
A paid piece of real work
We hand you an anonymized picture of a real company. You tell us which operation you would replace and why you would pick it over the others. It takes real hours, so we pay for those hours whether or not you get the job.
A conversation about what you decided
Two of us, one of them the person you would work with every week. We argue with your answer. That conversation is the interview.
A decision, with the reason
If it is no after the paid work, you get told what tipped it. You keep the fee.
The other open roles
Here to hire us, not to work here?
The assessment covers the whole company: how you get customers, how you deliver, and how the place runs. You get it in writing, and you can build from it with or without us.