Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

Location: Huntsville, AL – 100% Onsite, 5 days/week

Client/Program: FBI – EOD

Clearance: Top Secret

Position Overview

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to support mission-driven data engineering initiatives for the FBI. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience designing, developing, operationalizing, and maintaining data systems, with ETL/ELT pipeline development being one of the most important indicators of a strong candidate.

The role focuses on building scalable data pipelines and platforms, integrating disparate structured and unstructured data, and supporting data architecture, modeling, ingestion, database management, and cloud-based data solutions.

The successful candidate should demonstrate strong data engineering fundamentals and experience across multiple areas of the data engineering lifecycle. Candidates do not need to have every technology or functional area listed below.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, deploy, and maintain scalable data systems and data platforms.

• Build and maintain ETL/ELT data pipelines for large-scale batch and streaming workflows.

• Extract, transform, load, and integrate data from disparate structured, unstructured, and event-streaming sources.

• Support data ingestion, data modeling, schema design, database management, and data architecture activities.

• Develop and optimize data pipelines and platforms for scalability, reliability, and performance.

• Work with cloud-based data environments, with AWS strongly preferred.

• Analyze and tune data lake architecture, cloud storage, and data pipeline performance.

• Work with relational databases and technologies such as SQL and PostgreSQL.

• Collaborate with analysts, developers, data engineers, and data consumers in an Agile environment.

• Support data management activities involving data catalogs, governance, data usage, and lifecycle management.

• Help design and implement enterprise-scale data and analytics solutions.

• Apply appropriate data security, access control, and data protection practices.
  
  

Required Qualifications

• Fully adjudicated Top Secret clearance; interim TS is not acceptable.

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years of relevant experience, or 12+ years of relevant experience without a degree.

• Strong hands-on ETL/ELT experience.

• Experience designing, developing, operationalizing, and maintaining data systems.

• Experience building scalable ETL/ELT pipelines and automating batch and/or streaming data workflows.

• Strong programming/data skills in one or more of the following:

  • SQL

  • Python

  • Java

  • Scala

  • Spark

• Experience in a combination of at least two of the following areas:

  • Data architecture

  • Data modeling

  • Data ingestion

  • Schema design

  • Database management

  • Relational databases

  • Cloud data engineering experience.
    
    

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS cloud experience, particularly AWS data services.

• AWS RDS experience is particularly relevant.

• Azure cloud/data engineering experience may also be considered.

• Experience architecting and designing large-scale enterprise data and analytics systems.

• Experience with AWS or Azure data products, such as:

  • AWS EMR

  • AWS Glue

  • AWS RDS

  • Azure Dataverse

  • Azure Data Factory

  • Power Apps

• Experience with distributed data/computing technologies, including:

  • Apache Spark

  • Databricks

  • Apache NiFi

  • Airflow

  • Snowflake

  • Redshift

  • BigQuery

• Experience with data lakes, data warehouses, RESTful API models, event processing, or business intelligence.

• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Elasticsearch, Solr, MongoDB, or Cosmos DB.

• Experience with AI/ML data pipelines and processes.

• Experience with federal information system policies, including NIST 800-53 and FISMA.

• Experience with CI/CD and automation tools such as Jenkins or GitHub.

• TS/SCI with polygraph is a nice-to-have, but is not required for this position.