Senior Data Engineer

Steampunk • McLean, VA

1d

About The Position

We are looking for a seasoned Senior Data Engineer to work with our team and our clients to develop enterprise grade data platforms, services, and pipelines. The ideal candidate is a technologist with excellent communication and customer service skills and a passion for data and problem solving.

Requirements

• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the US government
• Bachelor's degree and 10+ years of work experience; OR No degree and 14+ years of work experience; OR Associate's degree and 12+ years of work experience; OR Master's degree and 8+ years of work experience
• Experience in Data Engineering, building scalable data pipelines and platforms
• Strong programming experience in Python, Java, or Scala
• Advanced SQL expertise, including query optimization, data modeling, and working with large-scale relational databases
• Hands-on experience with both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB)
• Proven experience designing and building end-to-end data pipelines that ingest, transform, and unify data from multiple disparate sources
• Experience working with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data (e.g., JSON, logs, documents, PDFs), including parsing and normalization
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Airflow, Luigi, or equivalent
• Strong understanding of data architecture patterns, including layered approaches such as Medallion Architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold)
• Experience designing unified data platforms that consolidate data from multiple formats and sources into an analytics-ready foundation
• Experience with data modeling, schema design, and handling schema evolution
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS (e.g., S3, Glue, EMR, Lambda, Redshift), or equivalent
• Experience ensuring data quality, integrity, and reliability, including validation and monitoring practices
• Ability to work with large, complex, and disconnected datasets and derive meaningful structure
• Experience working in Agile environments and collaborating with cross-functional teams

Nice To Haves

• Experience with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, or Lucene
• Experience integrating legacy systems with modern cloud-based data platforms, including data migration and transformation
• Familiarity with data governance, lineage, and metadata management practices
• Experience building data systems that support user-facing applications, analytics platforms, or search systems
• Experience working in design-driven, cross-functional teams (product, UX, engineering)
• Experience supporting AI/ML workflows, including feature engineering and data preparation
• Experience with vector databases and embeddings for semantic search or retrieval use cases (e.g. Weaviate, Pinecone, PostgreSQL pgvector)
• Familiarity with LLM-powered systems, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or natural language search
• Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune) and modeling complex relationships
• Experience designing systems for modern search or information retrieval use cases
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark (PySpark preferred)
• Familiarity with streaming or real-time data processing (e.g., Kafka, Spark Streaming)

Responsibilities

• Lead and architect migration of data environments with performance and reliability
• Assess and understand the ETL jobs, workflows, BI tools, and reports
• Address technical inquiries concerning customization, integration, enterprise architecture and general feature / functionality of data products
• Craft database / data warehouse solutions in cloud (Preferably AWS. Alternatively Azure, GCP)
• Support an Agile software development lifecycle
• Contribute to the growth of our Data Exploitation Practice

What This Job Offers

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