Data Ingestion & Engineering Lead — Restaurant Industry Intelligence

Data Ingestion & Engineering Lead — Restaurant Industry Intelligence Location: Remote (Global) | Type: Full-Time / Contract-to-Hire We are Aaron Allen & Associates, a global restaurant industry advisory firm, building the most comprehensive restaurant industry intelligence system in the world. We’re looking for a hands-on data engineer to design and run large-scale data ingestion and ETL pipelines — pulling from APIs, RSS feeds, PDFs, historical archives, trade publications, proprietary datasets, and more — into clean, structured, cloud-based data lakes for analysis, AI model training, and real-time industry insights. This is not a generic “AI Engineer” role. This is about plumbing, orchestration, and automation — making sure that if data exists anywhere in the world that’s relevant to the restaurant industry, we can grab it, clean it, organize it, and turn it into strategic intelligence. What You’ll Do Ingest & integrate data from dozens of sources: APIs, RSS, web scraping (structured/unstructured), PDFs, historical databases, MCP connectors. Build automated ETL pipelines (Python, Airflow/Prefect/Dagster) to transform messy multi-source data into normalized, queryable formats. Set up and maintain data lakes (BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar) to handle both batch and streaming data flows. Normalize and enrich data for semantic search, trend analysis, and AI/NLP workflows (e.g., vector databases, entity recognition, topic tagging). Work closely with leadership to prioritize new data sources and rapidly prototype ingestion connectors. Build feeds/APIs for downstream dashboards, reports, and curated industry briefings. What We’re Looking For Proven ETL & data pipeline experience (real-world systems, not just coursework). Strong Python skills for automation, scraping, and API integration. Familiarity with cloud-based data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, etc.) and orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster). Experience cleaning and normalizing large, messy datasets into consistent schemas. Bonus: Experience with semantic search, NLP preprocessing, vector databases. Ability to communicate clearly with non-technical leadership — no “alphabet soup” for the sake of it. Why This Role Matters Every consulting project we do starts with data collection and analysis. The faster and cleaner we can get apples-to-apples data across brands, geographies, categories, and timeframes, the faster we can deliver insights that move markets. You’ll be building the engine room of our global intelligence system. How to Apply: Send your CV and a brief note (max 200 words) explaining a real-world ingestion/ETL project you’ve built — what you did, the tools you used, and the outcome. We care more about your ability to deliver working systems than how many acronyms you know. • A screening challenge/test project of between 8-10hs will be required. Job Types: Full-time, Contract Pay: $95,135.22 - $114,571.45 per year Benefits: Paid time off Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chicago, IL 60601