Applied Machine Learning Engineer

Vulcan Elements is manufacturing American rare-earth permanent magnets for a secure, resilient future. With a focus on national security and economic resiliency, we serve critical industries such as defense, aerospace, and automotive, powering a high-technology future. Vulcan Elements is building a team of ambitious professionals committed to Mission Focus, Technical Excellence, and Transparency.

As the Data Engineer, you will design and build the data infrastructure that makes Vulcan’s operational and business data useful — first at pilot scale, and then as the foundation for a 10,000 ton/year facility. You will work from architecture to implementation: evaluating and selecting platforms, designing data models and pipelines, and building the systems that collect, contextualize, and deliver data to the teams and tools that depend on it.

Requirements

into a durable, scalable data architecture. As Vulcan grows, this role has the opportunity to expand into a team leadership position. This role begins in Durham, NC and is expected to move to Benson, NC upon completion of new facility.

, operational burden, and cost Review, refine, and implement data architecture design documents, ensuring designs are technically sound and account for CUI and ITAR data handling

Make and document key platform and design decisions with enough clarity that future team members can understand the reasoning and build on it Ensure the architecture scales from pilot plant to full-scale facility without fundamental redesign Apply sound engineering practices to everything you build: version control, testing, observability, and documentation, and hold those standards as the data team grows Data Pipeline & Integration Design and build ETL pipelines that move data from operational data stores into the data Lakehouse with full contextual enrichment, making it ready for analytics and AI workloads Build reliable ingest paths for structured data, time-series data, files, images, and other outputs from manufacturing and lab systems Collaborate across engineering, operations, and IT to understand data flows, dependencies, and integration

, and translate them into pipeline and architecture decisions Identify and eliminate manual data workflows, replacing them with monitored, reliable pipelines Diagnose and resolve data quality issues across the stack, and build monitoring into pipelines so problems surface early Data Modeling & Quality Define data models that support operational queries, analytical workloads, and future AI and ML applications Own data contextualization standards ensuring every data point carries the metadata needed to make it meaningful.

Responsibilities

Architecture & Platform Design Design and own Vulcan’s data architecture from operational data stores through ETL pipelines to the analytics and AI layer Evaluate and select platforms for the data Lakehouse, ETL tooling, and operational databases, weighing scalability, compliance

and tasks outlined are not exhaustive and may change as determined by the needs of the business.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience in data engineering, data infrastructure, or a closely related technical role with a track record of owning and delivering production systems Demonstrated experience designing and building data lakes, Lakehouses, or analytical data stores; understands the tradeoffs between platforms and can make and defend platform selection decisions Strong experience des