Data Engineer — AI Pipelines for National Security

Virtualitics, Inc.; Washington, Northern (District of Columbia, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation

Fully paid medical, dental, and vision

Unlimited PTO

Remote flexibility / hybrid options

Job summary

Virtualitics is seeking a Data Engineer in Washington, DC, to own data pipelines and the infrastructure powering AI-native readiness solutions for defense and government customers.

You’ll collaborate with ML and Platform teams to tailor ingestion and transformation workflows to mission-critical environments, applying best practices in data quality, security, and scalable architectures. Active SECRET+ clearance is required.

Qualifications

• Active US Government Security Clearance (SECRET or higher) required.
• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 4+ years of experience in data engineering, or building production data pipelines.
• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark).
• Strong experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and data modeling.
• Advanced AWS experience (S3, RDS, EMR, Lambda, IAM, CloudWatch); comfortable working within secure cloud environments.
• Experience building for data quality, validation, and observability.
• Familiarity with containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and delivery across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Model and manage structured and unstructured data to support AI/ML workloads, analytics, and application features.
• Partner with Full Stack Engineers, ML Engineers, and Data Scientists to productionize data workflows, feature pipelines, and model inputs.
• Build and improve automation for data quality, validation, lineage, and monitoring.
• Optimize storage, query performance, and cost across relational and object stores.
• Implement and enforce data security, access controls, and governance per DoD requirements.
• Support ingestion and integration of data within DoD and commercial customer environments, including secure/disconnected settings.
• Investigate and resolve data, pipeline, and performance issues.
• Collaborate with Platform, AI Engineers, DevSecOps, and QA to ensure reliable, scalable data architectures.

Skills

Python

SQL

4+ years data engineering

Data modeling

AWS (S3, RDS, EMR, Lambda, IAM, CloudW

PostgreSQL / MySQL

Spark

Data quality & observability

Security clearance (SECRET+)

Education

BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Airflow

dbt

Dagster

Kafka

Job description

Virtualitics is seeking a Data Engineer in Washington, DC, to own data pipelines and the infrastructure powering AI-native readiness solutions for defense and government customers.

You’ll collaborate with ML and Platform teams to tailor ingestion and transformation workflows to mission-critical environments, applying best practices in data quality, security, and scalable architectures. Active SECRET+ clearance is required.