---
title: 'Staff AI Engineer (Data & Intelligence function) at Acquia'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-ai-engineer-data-intelligence-function-acquia-canada-9rbgv04y3bkq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Staff AI Engineer (Data & Intelligence function) at Acquia

- **Company:** Acquia
- **Location:** Canada
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/acquia/jobs/8168833

## Job description

## About Acquia

Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out.

Headquartered in Boston, MA, Acquia is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company, is listed as one of the world’s top software companies by The Software Report, and is positioned as a market leader by the analyst community. We are Acquia. We are building for the future and we want you to be a part of it!

Career Exploration at Acquia

Our recruitment process is designed to empower you in making the most informed decisions. Acquia is committed to providing an inclusive, transparent, efficient, and educational interview experience that cultivates exploration into career opportunities at Acquia

You will discover the opportunity to grow your career here and learn from a global team that empowers you to exceed boundaries and achieve the extraordinary.

Acquia is the digital experience platform built for a world where your audience isn't only human. Its agents too.

As AI agents become active participants in how people discover, consume, and act on digital content, Acquia gives enterprise teams the platform to create, manage, and distribute experiences designed for both. Powered by agentic AI that orchestrates — not just advises — Acquia automates complex digital workflows within the governance guardrails large organizations require.

The world's #1 Drupal hosting provider, Acquia brings together Content Management, Digital Asset Management, and Product Information Management in a single AI-powered Command Center: Acquia Source.

Acquia. Built for every audience, human or otherwise.

The Role: Acquia is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join our Data & Intelligence function. Acquia runs one of the largest Drupal and digital experience footprints in the world, and holds more than a decade of operational, product, and customer data across it. This role exists to put that data to work: building the retrieval, graph, and inference layers on top of our data platform, and the agentic and deterministic systems that turn the resulting signals into action for our customers and our teams.

The remit is broad. Our function spans observability, our core data platform, and insights and intelligence, and you will work across all three alongside the product and platform teams that consume what we build. Scope moves with company priorities, so we are looking for someone comfortable changing context and picking up an unfamiliar problem. Much of what you build will be shared capability that several teams depend on.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will spend most of your time designing, building, and shipping production systems, and you will lift the AI engineering capability of the teams around you through the quality of your work rather than through management overhead. We ship early and iterate.

## Key Responsibilities

- Write and ship production AI code daily. You are an active contributor.
- Lead our work on making customer context retrievable at speed, across semantic retrieval, indexing, and knowledge graph approaches over our data platform. An early priority is letting an agent resolve a customer and pull its full context in a single request. Where that work goes from there is partly yours to define.
- Build the inference and signal layer: models and processors that read from our Iceberg-based lakehouse, write scored inference back, and expose signals through contracts other teams can build against.
- Take signals through to action, turning detected conditions such as churn risk, usage and entitlement mismatch, or expansion opportunity into workflows that act, with human review where that is the right design.
- Choose the right tool for each workload: a large model, a small fine-tuned model, or ordinary deterministic code. Managing inference cost is part of the job.
- Own evaluation and observability for our AI systems, so we can show a signal is sound before anyone acts on it.
- Set the patterns other teams build against, and work with engineering and business leaders to turn company goals into shipped systems.

## How We Think About Experience

We are more interested in how you learn than in the tools already on your CV. Our stack spans Python, SQL and dbt, distributed query engines, durable workflow orchestration, an Iceberg lakehouse on S3, and a changing mix of model providers and agent frameworks. It will look different in a year. We expect you to arrive without deep expertise in some of it and to close that gap fast, using AI to read unfamiliar codebases and get to a useful contribution before you are fully fluent. Range across languages, data platforms, and model providers counts for more with us than years inside any single one.

Required Experience

- 8+ years of software engineering, including 3+ years shipping AI or ML systems to production.
- Strong programming fundamentals and deep proficiency in at least one language used for AI and data work. Python is our primary language for ML and insights.
- Fluency working with data at scale — advanced SQL, a transformation layer such as dbt, and a distributed query engine over lakehouse or warehouse storage, including reasoning about query cost and partitioning.
- Production retrieval and context engineering — embeddings, vector search, hybrid or graph retrieval, and measuring whether retrieval is actually working. Experience modelling entities and relationships across multi-source data is valuable here.
- Agentic systems and durable workflows in production, with tool calling, state and memory, and human-in-the-loop patterns. We use Temporal and LangGraph; equivalent experience transfers.
- Evaluation and observability for AI systems — tracing, prompt and version management, and dataset-driven testing, whatever the tooling.
- Cloud deployment experience (AWS preferred) with containerized services, and ownership of inference cost.
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Desired Skills

- Experience standing up shared data or ML capability that other teams then built on.
- Small and fine-tuned model work, including distilling task-specific models to replace general-model calls at scale.
- Observability data fluency: OpenTelemetry, and logs, metrics and traces at very high volume, including what it takes to make that data queryable.
- Data governance instincts around access control, lineage, and data residency, treated as part of the design.
- Enterprise SaaS or CMS, including familiarity with Acquia's Drupal-based DXP.
- Agentic development workflow fluency: AI-assisted coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) as everyday accelerators, and MCP or similar for connecting agents to real systems.
- Strong communication skills — able to present AI system design to both engineers and C-suite stakeholders.
- Senior IC track record — known for the quality of your own code and system designs, with mentoring that happens organically through great work, not through meetings.

We are an organization that embraces innovation and the potential of AI to enhance our processes and improve our work. We are always looking for individuals who are open to learning new technologies and collaborating with AI tools to achieve our goals.

Acquia is proud to provide best-in-class benefits to help our employees and their families maintain a healthy body and mind. Core Benefits include: competitive healthcare coverage, wellness programs, take it when you need it time off, parental leave, recognition programs, and much more!

Acquia is an equal opportunity (EEO) employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veterans status or any other protected status or characteristic under federal, state or local law unrelated to the ability to perform the job.

We are seeking an AI-Native candidate who treats AI not as an external tool, but as a fundamental extension of their cognitive workflow. The ideal candidate possesses an orchestration mindset—the ability to skillfully prompt, manage, and direct AI to navigate complexity—and maintains a high degree of AI fluency.

You should be characterized by radical adaptability and a “builder” mentality, showing a restless drive to transform traditional work processes into agentic workflows. Beyond technical proficiency, we value intellectual humility: the willingness to constantly unlearn old methods in favor of more efficient, AI-augmented processes. You don't just use AI to do your job; you use it to redefine what your job can achieve.

## About Acquia

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Acquia provides the open digital experience platform (DXP) built on Drupal, helping enterprise marketing teams manage content, assets, and AI agents in a single workspace with built-in governance.
- **Entity Type**: Private (majority owned by Vista Equity Partners since 2019)
- **Headquarters**: Boston, Massachusetts, United States (53 State Street, 10th Floor, Boston, MA 02109)
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: Dries Buytaert (co-founded Acquia, also creator of Drupal)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), Content Management (CMS), Digital Asset Management (DAM), AI-driven content operations
- **Target customers**: Enterprise marketing teams, Fortune 500 brands, government agencies, global universities (e.g., Dana-Farber, Bayer, AB InBev, Mars, Crayola, Shake Shack, Warner Music Group, Stanford University)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Help companies effectively and efficiently manage content on their terms, build remarkable experiences, and connect more powerfully with their audiences." (from [acquia.com/about-us](https://www.acquia.com/about-us))

## Products & Services
- **Acquia Source**: A command center unifying content creation, digital asset management, and AI agents into one workspace. Designed for marketing teams to create, approve, and scale content with governance, removing handoffs between CMS, DAM, and workflow tools. (SaaS / Platform)
- **Acquia Cloud Platform**: The only infrastructure built exclusively for Drupal, offering 99.99% uptime SLA, FedRAMP and HIPAA compliance, and preemptive threat mitigation. Supports single to thousands of sites managed from a single interface. (PaaS / Cloud Infrastructure)
- **Acquia AI (Digital Teammates)**: AI agents that build sites, write content, maintain accessibility and SEO standards, with human-in-the-loop review. Native MCP (Model Context Protocol) support allows integration with agents like Claude, Cursor, Copilot. (AI / Agentic automation)
- **Multi Experience Operations**: Enables scaling from one site to thousands across channels. (SaaS)
- **280+ Integrations**: Connects with ERPs, analytics, commerce, marketing automation tools via Drupal’s open architecture and Acquia’s integration library. (Ecosystem)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metrics**: 
  - Annual Revenue: $201.1M (as reported on LinkedIn via [linkedin.com/company/acquia](https://www.linkedin.com/company/acquia))
  - Total Funding: $173.5M across 9 prior funding rounds (per LinkedIn)
  - Customers: 4,000+ organizations (per [acquia.com/about-us](https://www.acquia.com/about-us))
  - Employees: 1,000+ globally across 30+ countries (per [acquia.com/careers](https://www.acquia.com/careers))
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Vista Equity Partners (majority stake since 2019), Dries Buytaert (executive chairman). Over 700 global partners.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Headcount: 877 employees (-0.7% YoY per LinkedIn, but career page reports 1,000+ globally – may reflect difference in counting)
  - New product launch: Acquia Source (2025) – command center for AI-forward marketing
  - Expansion of AI capabilities with native MCP support
  - Serving Fortune 500 brands and government agencies with FedRAMP compliance

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open-source moat**: Built on Drupal, the open-source CMS created by Acquia’s co-founder. The company is the number-one contributor to Drupal core for over 15 years.
- **Exclusive Drupal infrastructure**: Only cloud platform built exclusively for Drupal; 99.99% uptime SLA, FedRAMP / HIPAA compliant.
- **Composable, not rigid**: Open architecture allows customers to connect their existing martech stack without lock-in.
- **Built-in governance**: Every AI action goes through human-in-the-loop review, with brand safety, compliance, and audit trails integrated into the workflow – not bolted on.
- **AI discoverability**: Content is structured natively for AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) without separate optimization steps.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-first digital experience**: Launching Acquia Source as a unified workspace for content, assets, and AI agents, targeting enterprise marketing teams that struggle with fragmented tooling.
- **Agentic automation**: Expanding digital teammates that act autonomously (write content, optimize SEO, maintain accessibility) while keeping humans in the loop.
- **MCP (Model Context Protocol) support**: Enabling any AI agent to connect directly to Acquia’s content platform, following an open protocol philosophy.
- **Continued open-source leadership**: Investing in the Drupal community and open architecture to differentiate from closed DXPs.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: Acquia emphasizes four core values: "Dare to Be Different" (authenticity, inclusion), "Do the Right Thing" (integrity, respect), "Jump In and Own It" (speed, collaboration), "Give Back More" (community service, open-source roots), and "Committed to Awesome" (customer success). (from [acquia.com/careers](https://www.acquia.com/careers))
- **Work environment**: Global team with flexibility – "greater flexibility in where we work" is stated, implying remote/hybrid options. Employees across 30+ countries.
- **Awards**: Great Place to Work certified; recognized for award-winning culture.
- **Growth & learning**: Acquia Academy provides education and learning resources. Annual People, Culture & Community roadmap with speakers, events, and inclusion initiatives.
- **Perks**: Community involvement (volunteer programs, gift drives). Collaborative environment that "inspires employees to make their biggest impact".

## Sources
1. [acquia.com/about-us](https://www.acquia.com/about-us)
2. [acquia.com/careers](https://www.acquia.com/careers)
3. [acquia.com/careers/culture](https://www.acquia.com/careers/culture)
4. [acquia.com](https://www.acquia.com/)
5. [linkedin.com/company/acquia](https://www.linkedin.com/company/acquia)

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