Data Engineer — Modernization & AI Pipelines (Arlington)

Expression Networks; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k matching

PPO and HDHP insurance

Education reimbursement up to $10,000/

Life insurance

Generous PTO and holidays

Onsite gym facility

Commuter Benefits

In-office Cold Brew

Job summary

Expression Networks is seeking a Data Engineer to support the DEA ICDE modernization, building scalable ETL pipelines and migrating legacy data to a modern, secure ecosystem for analytics and AI/ML tasks.

The role focuses on ingesting, transforming, validating, and integrating data across platforms, with a tight emphasis on data quality, governance, and collaboration with analysts and developers. Onsite work at DEA Headquarters in Arlington, VA is required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in STEM and 2+ years of professional experience.
• Hands-on experience with data analysis, ETL development, and data migration.
• Proficiency in SQL, including complex queries and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Python for data manipulation and automation.
• Experience with ETL frameworks or orchestration tools (Airflow, Talend, dbt).
• Understanding of data warehousing, dimensional modeling, and staging.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS Redshift, BigQuery, Azure SQL).
• Ability to document data mappings, transformations, and processes.
• Ability to collaborate with engineers, analysts, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable ETL pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
• Support large-scale migration of legacy data into the modernized DEA ecosystem.
• Analyze data structures and mappings to optimize workflows and automation.
• Implement data cleaning, standardization, validation, and transformation.
• Monitor data quality and integrity across systems and platforms.
• Develop data migration strategies across platforms and clouds.
• Create data validation checkpoints during migration activities.
• Collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and developers on requirements.
• Support data interoperability across integrated systems.
• Monitor pipeline performance and troubleshoot issues to improve reliability.
• Prepare data for analytics and AI/ML use cases.
• Participate in Agile sprint planning and reviews.
• Document data flows, mappings, and transformation logic.

Skills

SQL proficiency

Python for data manipulation

ETL development

Data migration

Airflow/Talend/dbt

Data warehousing concepts

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Data profiling and validation

Documentation of processes

Collaboration with stakeholders

Agile development

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM fields

Tools

Apache Airflow

Talend

dbt

AWS Redshift

Google BigQuery

Azure SQL

Git

Job description

Expression Networks is seeking a Data Engineer to support the DEA ICDE modernization, building scalable ETL pipelines and migrating legacy data to a modern, secure ecosystem for analytics and AI/ML tasks.

The role focuses on ingesting, transforming, validating, and integrating data across platforms, with a tight emphasis on data quality, governance, and collaboration with analysts and developers. Onsite work at DEA Headquarters in Arlington, VA is required.