Position Summary:

Senior GCP AI Data Engineer

This role will be responsible for designing and implementing the core content ingestion, transformation, and search enablement capabilities of a Smart Search solution on Google Cloud using Google Vertex AI Search to deliver secure, permission-based search outcomes.

Mandatory Skills:

• Extensive experience in software engineering, cloud computing, big data and analytics, and cloud platforms
• Extensive experience and exposure with cloud data engineering and modern cloud‑native data architectures and practices
• Proven experience designing and implementing medallion Lakehouse architectures including schema design ( incorporating schema drift), tuning, and optimization
• Extensive experience in the Design and delivery of cloud-native data platform components on GCP, including secure multi-environment setups, ingestion pipelines, transformation layers aligned to governance and best practice.
• Hands-on experience Building and optimizing full + incremental data pipelines to extract content, metadata, and permissions from source systems( both on-prem and cloud) , with a focus on scalability, reliability, cost and reduced source-system load.
• Hands-on experience using GCP to Implement serverless and container-based workloads for data ingestion, transformation, and integration using GCP Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, selecting patterns that fit event-driven and batch/incremental processing needs.
• Orchestrate multi-step data processing and integration flows using Cloud Workflows, including retry/error-handling patterns and end-to-end execution coordination across pipeline stages.
• Use Google GCS as a landing/staging layer for extracted content and metadata, supporting structured/unstructured data preparation workflows and downstream processing for search or analytics use cases.
• Prepare enterprise data for Google Vertex AI Search indexing, including content extraction, metadata modelling, and transformation into Vertex AI Search-compatible schemas (facets/enriched metadata).
• Design and implement permission-aware search by extracting and validating access/permission data and mapping it into ACL-aligned schemas for access-controlled search results.
• Configure and deploy Vertex AI Search datastores and search experiences and validate indexing/search behaviour for both structured and unstructured content.
• Provision and manage secure multi-environment cloud infrastructure using Terraform ( IAC) , enabling repeatable deployments and consistent configuration across environments.
• Ability to design and implement secure multi‑environment cloud architectures, including IAM, network controls, audit logging, and compliance
• Experience with CI/CD for deploying cloud resources and data pipelines
• Experience in building analytical dashboards and visualisations using PowerBI or Looker

Roles And Responsibilities:

• Ensure responsible AI guardrails are embedded throughout the Vertex AI lifecycle, including data ingestion, model training, inference, evaluation, and deployment.
• Collaborate with security, risk, privacy, and legal stakeholders to define and operationalise responsible AI policies, approval workflows, and compliance checks for Vertex AI solutions.
• Strong understanding of customer and business requirements with the ability to translate them into technical designs , architectures and actionable implementation plans
• Conduct security, performance, load, and integration testing across environments
• Support UAT, production deployment, and hyper‑care activities
• Act as a technical advisor, supporting use case identification, technical evaluation, and solution adoption
• Combine business context with hands‑on engineering to deliver fit‑for‑purpose solutions
• Collaborate with stakeholders to secure buy‑in and successful delivery outcomes
• Produce architecture diagrams, runbooks, operations guides, and technical documentation
• Contribute learnings and feedback to reusable solution patterns and internal assets
• Ensure monitoring, incident response, enhancements, and BAU transition support during hyper‑care

Salary Range: >$100,000

Date of Posting: 12-Feb-26

Next Steps: If you feel this opportunity suits you, or Cognizant is the type of organization you would like to join, we want to have a conversation with you! Please apply directly with us.

For a complete list of open opportunities with Cognizant, visit http://www.cognizant.com/careers. Cognizant is committed to providing Equal Employment Opportunities. Successful candidates will be required to undergo a background check.

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About us:

Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies, transforming clients' business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant (a member of the NASDAQ-100 and one of Forbes World's Best Employers 2025) is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com

Cognizant is an equal opportunity employer. Your application and candidacy will not be considered based on race, color, sex, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

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Disclaimer:

Compensation information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.

Applicants may be required to attend interviews in person or by video conference. In addition, candidates may be required to present their current state or government issued ID during each interview.