AI Automation & Data Platform Lead

This is a remote position. AI Automation & Data Platform Lead(Build & Scale Our AI-Driven Global Sourcing Platform) About ASC GlobalASC Global is a global independent distributor and sourcing company serving the electron

• This is a remote position.
• AI Automation & Data Platform Lead
• (Build & Scale Our AI-Driven Global Sourcing Platform)
• About ASC Global
• ASC Global is a global independent distributor and sourcing company serving the electronic-components, computer and data-center, industrial MRO and aviation MRO markets. We source semiconductors, passive components, interconnect products, memory, computer hardware, data-center infrastructure and industrial/aviation parts from suppliers worldwide.
• The Opportunity
• We're building an AI-driven global sourcing and product-intelligence platform, and we need someone who can both build it and help the rest of the company put AI to work. This is a rare hybrid: part hands-on technical builder, part AI/automation lead for the business. You'll personally architect and ship a system that continuously monitors hundreds of distributor sites, broker inventories, marketplaces and manufacturer sources - identifying products, capturing pricing and availability, and matching listings to canonical parts - while also working directly with our buyers, sales, operations and leadership to find and implement practical AI use cases across the company.
• This is not a role where you hand requirements to someone else and wait. You'll write the code, deploy the system, and also run the workshops that get people using it.
• What You'll Do
• Build and operate the crawling, data-ingestion, normalization and matching platform - handling static and JavaScript-rendered sites, PDFs, pagination and multilingual content, with full source provenance on every record
• Design the canonical product/supplier/offer data model and the entity-resolution logic that matches listings to real parts
• Use LLMs where they genuinely help (extraction, translation, classification) with proper evaluation, confidence thresholds and human review - never letting a model guess a price or quantity it can't find
• Connect the platform to Zoho CRM's RFQ workflow and, downstream, QuickBooks
• Work with Sales, Purchasing, Operations and Finance to spot other processes AI or automation can improve, turn those into real pilots, train employees to use them, and track the impact
• What Success Looks Like
• A working architecture and data model within the first 90 days
• At least 10 sources connected with full provenance
• Searchable, normalized product and supplier data
• Measured matching accuracy
• Source-health monitoring in place
• An initial Zoho RFQ integration
• Beyond that: measurable hours saved, faster sourcing turnaround, broader AI adoption across departments, and a documented plan for scaling to hundreds of sources
• What We're Looking For
• Five or more years of hands-on software/data-engineering experience with real production ownership of web-crawling or large-scale data-acquisition systems - not personal projects or coursework
• Advanced Python and strong SQL
• Experience with a production crawling framework (e.g. Scrapy) and browser automation (Playwright or Selenium) for JavaScript-rendered sites
• Solid grounding in HTTP, rate limiting, retries, queues and failure recovery
• Experience building normalized pipelines from messy, conflicting data, plus entity resolution / fuzzy matching / deduplication work backed by real accuracy numbers
• Strong PostgreSQL (or similar), plus Docker and at least one major cloud platform
• Comfortable using LLM APIs in production - structured outputs, evaluation, cost control - without treating them as a replacement for deterministic checks
• Personally implemented an AI or automation solution inside a real company (not just used the tools), ideally across more than one department, and comfortable running training and translating business needs into requirements for other engineers
• Nice to Have
• Temporal, Dagster, Prefect or Airflow
• OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
• RapidFuzz, Splink or embeddings-based matching
• Zoho, Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks or other ERP integrations
• Electronic components or other co