Data Engineer - Expert

Dark Wolf Solutions • Herndon, VA

3d • $165,000 - $200,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Dark Wolf constructs and deploys data management and analytics solutions for the defense and intelligence communities. We’re proud to boast a world-class engineering team that thrives on rolling up their sleeves to solve your mission’s biggest challenges. Dark Wolf is seeking an Expert Data Engineer to lead the architectural development, scaling, and governance of enterprise-grade data platforms. You will be responsible for designing high-throughput data meshes, establishing automated data quality frameworks, optimizing distributed compute clusters, and ensuring high resilience across air-gapped and multi-cloud networks.

Requirements

• Must be a US Citizen holding an active TS/SCI security clearance with an active Full-Scope Polygraph.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 7-10+ years of data engineering experience.
• Expert-level mastery of Apache Spark, Flink, Kafka, Ray, and workflow orchestration engines.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems internals, LSM trees, column-family stores, and lakehouse storage formats (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi).
• Enterprise data strategy, conceptual-to-physical data modeling, and streaming data schema contracts.
• Mastery of Python, Scala, SQL, and Go for high-performance data platform development.
• Advanced Kubernetes cluster management, custom operators for data platforms, and service mesh integration.
• Proven experience acting as a Technical Lead or Scrum Master directing engineering pods.
• Advanced experience architecting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud data platform solutions (IaC via Terraform).
• Deep understanding of DevSecOps pipelines, automated compliance testing, and secret rotation management.
• US Citizenship with an active TS/SCI security clearance with Full-Scope Polygraph.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree preferred.
• Advanced Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, CISSP, or Databricks Certified Professional Data Engineer.
• Proven track record architecting data solutions for deployment in air-gapped or high-assurance defense networks.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architectural design and implementation of distributed, high-throughput batch and streaming data platforms.
• Optimize distributed execution engines (Spark, Trino/Presto) to handle petabyte-scale datasets under strict SLAs.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision data platform assets across multi-cloud infrastructure.
• Establish zero-trust security controls, data lineage tools, and automated compliance scanning for regulated data environments.
• Act as a Technical Pod Lead, driving Agile sprint deliverables, establishing technical standards, and mentoring data engineering staff.

Benefits

• We are strictly looking for direct, full-time W2 employees. We do not engage with third-party staffing agencies, C2C, or 1099 independent contractors for this role.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior