Senior Data Engineering Lead

BOOST LLC is a dynamic management consulting firm that offers an array of government-compliant back-office solutions to support our teaming partners within the GovCon space. Our consultants are experts in the areas of Accounting, Contracts, Human Resources, Recruiting & Sourcing, and Strategic Pricing and our passion is to guide and propel our partners towards success within this competitive sector.

BOOST is partnering with a cleared small business that provides mission-critical, AI-driven cyber defense and reverse engineering solutions for U.S. Government clients to hire a Senior Data Engineering Lead. This opportunity is 100% onsite located in the Northern Virginia area.

Position Summary:

As the Senior Data Engineering Lead, you will be the senior technical authority driving the design, implementation, and sustainment of high-performance ETL pipelines, data normalization frameworks, and schema standardization strategies across multiple secure enclaves. Your work will directly power mission-critical AI/ML analytics, hunt operations, and executive decision dashboards. This role demands absolute commitment to mission-first, people-always values, enforcing data-governance policies and mentoring engineers with zero tolerance for mission failure. You will serve as a trusted steward of data architecture supporting decisive mission execution at the highest security and performance levels.

Responsibilities:

• Architect scalable, fault-tolerant ETL pipelines using Spark, NiFi, Kafka, and Python to ingest and transform petabyte-scale telemetry under secure mission conditions.

• Design and maintain canonical schemas and robust data normalization layers (Parquet, Delta, Iceberg) to enable consistent, query-ready, high-value datasets.

• Develop automated data-quality checks, data lineage tracking, and anomaly-detection alerting systems, fully integrated with data-governance catalogs.

• Collaborate with AI/ML engineers, hunt analysts, and DevSecOps teams to optimize data partitioning, serialization formats, and feature engineering pipelines for training and real-time analytics.

• Implement granular security controls including row-level, column-level, and field-level encryption while ensuring compliance with NIST standards and classified data-handling protocols.

• Maintain and optimize performance dashboards, cost dashboards, cluster sizing, storage tiering, and caching strategies to deliver best-in-class mission performance.

• Lead code reviews, enforce CI/CD practices for data pipeline deployments, and mentor junior data engineers to build a high-performing, secure engineering culture.

• Author and maintain architectural documentation, data dictionaries, and SOPs; deliver technical briefings to mission leadership and program stakeholders.

Required Qualifications:

• Eight plus (8+) years in data engineering or large-scale analytics platform development in classified, highly regulated, or mission-critical environments.

• Expertise with distributed processing frameworks (Apache Spark, Flink), streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis), and relational/NoSQL data stores.

• Proven experience designing canonical data models, normalization pipelines, and schema-evolution strategies.

• Proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks and automation.

• Strong knowledge of data-security controls, including RBAC, identity and access management, and encryption protocols for data at rest and in transit.

• Ability to translate complex data architecture concepts to diverse technical and non-technical audiences.

• Demonstrated commitment to mission-first, people-always execution with zero tolerance for mission failure.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Certifications such as AWS Big Data Specialty, Google Professional Data Engineer, or Databricks Certified Data Engineer.

• Experience with vector databases (QDrant, OpenSearch) and optimizing embedding stores for mission-scale analytics.

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Prefect, Dagster).

• Experience automating compliance evidence collection in support of RMF or FedRAMP audits.

Clearance Requirement:

• Active TS/SCI with Poly

Salary Range:

• $195K-$215K (Salary commensurate with experience)

BOOST is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.