Assent is the leading solution for supply chain sustainability tailored for the world’s top-tier, sustainability-driven manufacturers. Hidden risks riddle supply chains, many of which weren't built with sustainability in mind. That's where we step in. With insights from experts, Assent is the tool manufacturers trust for comprehensive sustainability.

We are proud to announce that Assent has crossed the US$100M ARR milestone, granting us Centaur Status. This accomplishment, reached just 8 years following our Series A, makes us the first and only Certified B Corporation in North America's SaaS sustainability industry to celebrate this milestone.

Our journey from $5 million to US$100M ARR in just eight years has been marked by significant growth and achievements. With our $350 million US funding led by Vista Equity Partners, we're poised for even greater expansion and are on the lookout for outstanding team members to join our mission.

Hybrid Work Model

At Assent, we proudly embrace a remote-first work model, valuing the flexibility and autonomy it provides our team. We also acknowledge the intangible benefits of occasional in-person workdays. For team members situated within 50 kms/31 miles of our five global offices in Ottawa, Eldoret, Penang, Columbus, Pune and Amsterdam, you can expect to come into the office 1-3 days a week. Similarly, those near our co-working spaces in Nairobi and Toronto are encouraged to work onsite once a month.

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer, AI/ML with deep expertise in knowledge base construction, retrieval-augmented reasoning (RAQ/RAG), and Generative AI data pipelines to help enable Assent’s R&D toward Agentic AI systems.

In this role, you will design, build, and maintain intelligent data infrastructures that supply context, memory, and reasoning capabilities to autonomous AI agents. Your work will connect structured and unstructured enterprise data into continuously updated knowledge graphs and vectorized stores that empower dynamic retrieval, planning, and decision-making.

You will collaborate with AI/ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams to create scalable, auditable, and high-fidelity data pipelines that feed both assistive and autonomous AI functions. This position is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of data engineering, AI architecture, and knowledge representation.

Key Requirements & Responsibilities 

• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines for Agentic and Generative AI systems, enabling context retrieval, multi-step reasoning, and adaptive knowledge updates.

• Develop and manage knowledge bases, vector stores, and graph databases to organize and retrieve information across diverse regulatory, product, and supplier domains.

• Engineer retrieval-augmented reasoning (RAQ/RAG) pipelines, integrating embedding generation, contextual chunking, and retrieval orchestration for LLM-driven agents.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with AI/ML, MLOps, Data, and Product teams to define data ingestion, transformation, and retrieval strategies aligned with evolving AI agent capabilities.

• Implement and automate workflows for ingestion of structured and unstructured content (documents, emails, APIs, metadata) into searchable, continuously enriched data stores.

• Design feedback and reinforcement loops that allow AI agents to validate, correct, and refine their knowledge sources over time.

• Ensure data quality, consistency, and traceability through schema validation, metadata tagging, and lineage tracking within knowledge and vector systems.

• Integrate monitoring and observability to measure retrieval performance, coverage, and model-data alignment for deployed agents.

• Collaborate with data governance and security teams to enforce compliance, access control, and Responsible AI data handling standards.

• Document schemas, pipelines, and data models to ensure reproducibility, knowledge sharing, and long-term maintainability.

• Stay at the forefront of AI data innovation, evaluating new technologies in graph reasoning, embedding architectures, autonomous data agents, and memory frameworks.

• Be familiar with corporate security policies and follow the guidance set out by processes and procedures of Assent.

We strongly value your talent, energy and passion. It will also be valuable to Assent if you have the following qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering or applied AI infrastructure, with hands-on expertise in knowledge-centric or agentic AI systems.

• Proven experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and retrieval-augmented reasoning/querying (RAQ) data pipelines.

• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with experience designing large-scale data processing and orchestration workflows (Airflow, Prefect, Step Functions, or similar).

• Deep familiarity with vector databases (e.g., Weaviate, Pinecone, FAISS, Elastic Vector Search, Milvus) and graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, AWS Neptune, ArangoDB).

• Hands-on experience with embedding generation, semantic indexing, and context chunking for LLM retrieval and reasoning.

• Experience with agentic AI protocols and orchestration frameworks such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangChain Agents, Semantic Kernel, or DSPy, LlamaIndex Agents, or custom orchestration layers enabling seamless interaction between models, tools, and enterprise data sources.

• Knowledge of cloud data platforms (AWS preferred: S3, Glue, Lambda, ECS, Athena, Redshift) and infrastructure-as-code tools.

• Knowledge of data modeling, schema design, and indexing strategies for both relational and NoSQL systems.

• Understanding of LLM data workflows, including prompt evaluation, retrieval contexts, and fine-tuning data preparation.

Life at Assent

Wellness: We believe that you and your family’s well being is important. As a result, we offer vacation time that increases with tenure, comprehensive benefits packages (details vary by country), life leave days and more.

Financial Benefits: It’s not all about the money – well, it’s a little about the money. We understand that financial health is important and we offer a competitive base salary, a corporate bonus program, retirement savings options and more.

Life at Assent: There is purpose beyond your work. We provide our team members with flexible work options, volunteer days and opportunities to get involved in corporate giving initiatives.

Lifelong Learning: At Assent, curiosity is not only valued but encouraged. You will receive professional development days that are available to you the day you start.

At Assent, we are committed to growing and sustaining an environment where our team members feel included, valued, and heard. Our diversity and equal opportunity practices are guided and championed by our Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion includes recruiting and retaining team members from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and fostering a culture of belonging where all team members are included, treated with dignity and respect, promoted on their merits, and placed in positions to contribute to business success.

If you require assistance or accommodation throughout any part of the interview and selection process, please contact [email protected] and we will be happy to help.