Data Operations Engineer (TS/SCI)

Zachary Piper Solutions is seeking a cleared Data Operations Engineer to support the United States Air Force's Joint Fires Network program in San Diego, California. This role operates in a low-supervision, independent capacity, working with cross-domain groups across the nation.

About the role

Full-time, on-site position in San Antonio, Texas, focused on managing real-time data ingest operations, monitoring data quality, and supporting the delivery of mission-critical data feeds. The program has been awarded and is currently in month 7 of a 5-year contract. Travel up to 15% to Oahu, Hawaii may be required, including long-distance trips to additional government or contractor facilities.

Responsibilities

• Support continuous data ingest operations, monitoring data feeds, pipeline health, and overall data quality.
• Visualize and interpret data findings through dynamic reports and dashboards for leadership and users.
• Use data manipulation and visualization tools to communicate real-time and historical trends.
• Collaborate with platform, software, and data engineering teams to reconfigure pipelines for improved reliability.
• Work with data in multiple formats including Excel, CSV, JSON, and XML.
• Support incident management processes including issue documentation, resolution, and root-cause analysis for recurring data outages.
• Develop and maintain software to automate monitoring of real-time data feeds, including alerts for timeliness, lineage, volume, and distribution issues.
• Leverage historical pipeline data to identify improvements in ingest performance and reliability.
• Assist with designing, developing, testing, and implementing web-based collaboration and reporting tools.
• Demonstrate proficiency in Python or Bash scripting for analytics, automation, and data operations.
• Utilize open-source analytics and visualization tools to monitor system performance.

Requirements

• Must have an active TS/SCI clearance.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, Information Systems, or related field.
• 5-15 years of experience in data engineering or related experience.
• At least 1+ years of experience with real-time data streaming.
• Strong experience handling structured and unstructured data across various formats.
• Proficiency with Python.
• Experience with JSON or XML.
• Experience with any of the following data streaming tools: Apache (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, Storm, Samza, Spark, Beam, Redpanda, or NiFi), Confluent Platform, StreamNative Platform, Cloudera Streaming, AWS Kinesis Data Streams/Firehose, AWS MSK, Google Cloud Data Stream, Google Dataflow (stream mode), RabbitMQ, NATS Jetstream, ZeroMQ.
• Experience with Linux OS.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with intelligence and C2 data sets (ELINT, COMINT, MASINT, GEOINT).
• Knowledge of data mining, data modeling, statistics, and machine learning.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes cluster deployment and management.

Pay

Pay range: $150,000 - $230,000 (based on years of relevant experience).

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision.
• 401k retirement plan.
• 20 days of paid time off.
• 11 federal holidays.
• Sick leave.