Principal Data Platform Engineer

Role Summary

A full-time Principal Data Platform Engineer is sought to lead the design and development of a new, cloud-based data and AI platform supporting federal background investigation workflows. This senior-level position involves end-to-end architecture ownership, ensuring the platform meets compliance, security, and operational standards. The role offers high ownership in a high-trust environment, working closely with cloud engineering, data science, and security teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and compliant data solutions.

Responsibilities

- Design and establish a comprehensive data and AI platform architecture, including compute, storage, and lakehouse foundation. - Automate platform deployment and configuration using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and develop CI/CD pipelines for smooth environment promotion. - Implement robust data governance, cataloging, lineage tracking, and access controls as integral components of the platform. - Build and manage data ingestion, transformation, and pipeline layers to produce analysis-ready, governed data products. - Ensure platform design adheres to FedRAMP Moderate, NIST 800-171, and CUI handling requirements, integrating compliance into architecture from the outset. - Define artifact validation and promotion processes that facilitate secure and validated deployment workflows. - Collaborate with cloud engineering teams across infrastructure and security boundaries to establish clear ownership and standards. - Enable data science and machine learning teams with performant tooling and governed data to accelerate model development and deployment. - Manage platform’s reliability, performance, and cost efficiency as usage scales, setting engineering standards and documentation practices.

Qualifications

- This position requires eligibility for a U.S. Government security clearance. In accordance with federal law, U.S. citizenship is required. - Minimum of 8 years’ experience in data engineering or data platform engineering, with demonstrated senior-level ownership of complete platform solutions. - Proven track record building data platforms or lakehouses from scratch, including architecture design and implementation. - Hands-on experience designing batch and/or streaming data pipelines and SQL transformations on lakehouse or Delta foundation. - Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data transformation and pipeline development. - Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipeline development for data workloads. - Expertise in platform-level data governance, including cataloging, lineage, and access controls. - Cloud experience with major providers, preferably Azure; AWS or GCP considered. - Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and communication skills. - Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a relevant technical field.