Big Data Engineer

SAIC; Honolulu (HI); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

SAIC in Honolulu, HI seeks a Big Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain real-time and near-real-time data ingestion pipelines that cross security domains using CDS/guards. The role ensures reliable data flow, quality, and observability for mission-critical systems.

You will partner with data engineers, platform teams, analytics, and security/governance to deliver low-latency data while complying with cross-domain and data classification requirements. On-site in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Qualifications

• 9+ years of experience in data engineering or related roles; TS/SCI clearance required.
• U.S. Citizenship and a TS/SCI clearance is required.
• BS degree in CS, Math, EE, Physics, information systems/technology or related field.
• 3+ years of experience supporting production data pipelines; strong scripting skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain real-time/near-realtime ingestion pipelines.
• Ensure data quality, observability, and scalability across domains.
• Collaborate with data/platform engineers and security teams.
• Automate monitoring and alerting for data timeliness and reliability.
• Translate pipeline learnings into improvements and enforce encryption/auth policies.

Skills

Python

Bash

Linux

Data engineering

ETL/ELT concepts

Education

Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Information Systems, Information Technology, or related field

Tools

Apache NiFi

REST APIs

Grafana

Prometheus

Snowflake

Kafka

JMS

Job description

Description

We are seeking a Big Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain real-time and near-realtime data ingestion pipelines supporting a mission-critical system and moves data across security domains using cross domain solutions (CDS) / guards. You will be responsible for the reliable flow of streaming data from a wide range of sources into our data platform, ensuring data quality, observability, and scalability.

You’ll partner closely with data engineers, platform engineers, analytics teams, and security/governance personnel to deliver trustworthy, low-latency data that supports operational decisions — while ensuring compliance with cross-domain and data classification requirements. This position is on-site in Honolulu, HI.

Key Responsibilities

• Aid the team in delivering continual data feeds to users and monitoring the health of data quality and overall data ingest.
• Design, build, and maintain resilient real-time/near-realtime ingestion pipelines using Apache NiFi and REST APIs, with appropriate backpressure, prioritization, retries, and error-handling strategies.
• Configure and monitor data flows moving across security domains via cross domain guards/solutions, ensuring data integrity and compliance with transfer policies.
• Parse, transform, validate, and route structured and unstructured data in a variety of formats, including Excel, CSV, JSON, and XML.
• Employ data manipulation and visualization tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus) to effectively convey pipeline status, data quality, and historical trends to leadership, users, and the data team.
• Collaborate with platform, software, and other data engineers to (re)configure and continuously improve data ingestion pipeline reliability.
• Develop and maintain software/scripts to automate monitoring of real-time feeds and alert on timeliness, volume, lineage, and distribution data issues.
• Translate learnings from historical pipeline data into actionable steps to improve data ingest reliability and performance.
• Partner with security and governance teams to enforce encryption, authentication, authorization, and data classification requirements across pipelines and cross-domain transfers.
• Write and maintain scripts (Python, Bash, or similar) to automate data processing, validation, and monitoring tasks.
• Document data flows, system configurations, and standard operating procedures.

Qualifications

• TYPICAL EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: Bachelors and nine (9) years or more experience; Masters and seven (7) years or more experience ; PhD or JD and four (4) years or more experience.
• U.S. Citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance.
• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Information Systems, Information Technology, or related field.
• 3+ years of experience in data engineering, data operations, or DevOps roles supporting production data pipelines.
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or similar scripting languages commonly used in data science/data analytics applications.
• Working knowledge of the Linux (RedHat) command line; familiarity with Windows environments.
• Solid understanding of data engineering fundamentals: data pipelines, streaming architectures, ETL/ELT concepts, and data quality principles.
• Familiarity with JSON, XML, CSV, and Excel data formats, parsing, and transformation.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• Experience with streaming/messaging platforms and tools: Kafka, JMS, Apache Flink/Spark Streaming.
• Experience with monitoring/observability tools: Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch.
• Experience with data platforms such as Snowflake.
• Familiarity with cross domain solutions/guards (e.g., data diode concepts, transfer validation, content filtering).
• Experience enforcing encryption, authentication/authorization, and data classification policies in partnership with security/governance teams.
• Experience with version control tools (e.g., Git) and Agile/Scrum practices.
• Prior experience in a government, defense, or intelligence community environment.

Target salary range: $120,001 - $160,000. The estimate displayed represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience and other factors.