About the Role
Title: AI Engineer [Trading Analytics & Data Engineering]
Location: Houston, TX
Department: PTS - SHELL
Job Description:
Join the ECI Group's Professional Technical Services Network as an AI Engineer [Trading Analytics & Data Engineering]. This is a Houston based contract role with an anticipated May 5, 2026 start date and ending on December 31, 2026. Note: You must be a US Citizen or Permanent US Resident to qualify for this position.
About the role
We're hiring an AI Engineer with a strong data engineering foundation and excellent communication skills—ideally with commodity or financial trading experience. You'll partner with traders and trading analysts to rapidly build AI powered analytics over market pricing and fundamentals data, using Databricks and Spark to deliver value at speed.
What you'll do:
Design and ship AI driven analytics for front office use (seasonality, correlation, regression, forecasting, scenario modelling).
Build reusable and scalable data pipelines in Databricks (PySpark/Spark, Delta/Unity Catalog), optimizing cost, reliability, and performance.
Run statistical/econometric analyses on large datasets (e.g., market & fundamental time series data).
Collaborate directly with traders/analysts—translate ambiguous questions into shippable solutions; communicate insights clearly.
Implement LLM/agentic workflows: prompt engineering, LangGraph orchestration, MCP integrations, tool calling, retrieval, and guardrails.
Productionize solutions with testing, observability, versioning, and documentation.
What you'll bring:
Hands on Databricks + Spark expertise (PySpark, SQL, Delta, Unity Catalog).
Proven data engineering skills (ingestion, modelling, orchestration, performance tuning).
Strong statistics/economics/data science fundamentals formarket time series.
Experience building LLM solutions (prompting, retrieval, agent flows; LangGraph, MCP) and integrating with trading data/services.
Experience with CI/CD, Terraform, MLflow/feature stores, vector DBs, and governance (PII handling, data lineage).
Excellent stakeholder skills; able to work on desk with traders/analysts and deliver fast.
Nice to have:
Background in commodity or financial trading.
Familiarity with market microstructure, supply demand fundamentals, risk management.
Ways of working
Hybrid; high touch collaboration with trading teams.
Bias to prototype fast, iterate with users, and harden to production.
Maintain operational stability of production pipelines using secure, modern CI/CD engineering practices — with automated testing, quality gates, and built in reliability across development, security, and operations.
Please Note: The ECI Group uses AI-assisted tools in the early stages of application review, with all decisions guided by human oversight and fully compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ECI Group's applicable data protection policies and Privacy Notice.
