Senior Data Engineer

Support a National Security mission by helping position NGA as the enterprise and community GEOINT data provider through scalable cloud data engineering.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, development, and operation of scalable data pipelines and ETL/ELT processes for analytics, reporting, and mission operations
• Design and oversee API connectors and integrations to ingest data securely from internal platforms and external services
• Define engineering approaches for data processing, storage, and database performance to meet scale, reliability, and latency needs
• Build and improve data quality, validation, monitoring, and governance practices across production data products
• Partner with mission stakeholders, analysts, architects, and product teams to define requirements and guide technical solutions
• Diagnose and resolve complex data integration, pipeline, and production performance incidents
• Coordinate with security and compliance teams to incorporate required protections and controls into data systems
• Maintain architecture and operational documentation, and mentor engineers through design discussions and code reviews
• Contribute to Agile planning and delivery by breaking down work and managing technical dependencies
• Evaluate platform and tooling choices, communicate tradeoffs, and recommend improvements to data architecture and engineering practices

Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to design, write, review, and support production code in Python, Scala, Java, or a comparable language
• Experience using Git, automated testing, and CI/CD practices
• Strong experience with ETL/ELT architecture, data modeling, data quality, and secure API integrations, including troubleshooting authentication and data exchange issues
• Strong engineering judgment for selecting data architectures and patterns for complex, evolving datasets
• Experience delivering and operating scalable production data pipelines across structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data
• Experience designing API connectors and ingestion patterns that integrate enterprise applications and external services
• Ability to own complex data engineering work end-to-end: requirements, design, and production operation with improvements to reliability and data quality
• Experience leading technical collaboration with analytics, data science, product, security, or mission teams, including mentoring engineers
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs

Technologies

• Python
• Scala
• Java
• Git
• CI/CD
• ETL/ELT

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance
• Accrued PTO including vacation, sick leave, and holidays

Work Schedule

• Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm

Clearance Required

• TS/SCI CI Poly

Minimum Experience & Education

• At least 5 years of relevant experience with a bachelor’s degree, or at least 3 years with a related master’s degree
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, mathematics, or a related field plus 5–8 years

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of metadata standards
• Knowledge of Search tools and Search results organization, including implications of metadata organization, indexing, and catalog content
• Experience in GIS-related applications

Location: Springfield, VA (onsite)