Lead Data Engineer

MITRE Corporation; Bedford (MA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

MITRE Corporation is seeking a highly motivated Lead Data Engineer to join their Data Environments and Engineering Department in Bedford, Massachusetts. This role is ideal for candidates with strong SQL and Python skills ready to tackle challenges in data management and sharing that support decision-making processes.

The position requires a minimum of 8 years of experience or equivalent education levels, with a strong focus on building data systems, modern data architectures, and cloud technology familiarity. The work model is hybrid, providing flexibility in the work environment.

Qualifications

• 8 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree; or 6 years and a master's degree; or a PhD with 3 years' experience.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a DoD clearance.
• Hands-on experience with one or more database technologies.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong knowledge of ETL/ELT processes and frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of contributions to sponsor challenges and deliverables.
• Design and build prototypes for data ingestion and analysis.
• Collect and prepare data for analysis by data scientists.
• Document data transformation rules for system interfaces.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data Engineering

ETL/ELT Processes

Cloud Platforms

Education

Bachelor's or higher in relevant field

Tools

PostgreSQL

Oracle

MongoDB

AWS

Azure

Hadoop

Job description

The Data Environments and Engineering Department (L176) in the Data and Human Centered Solutions Innovation Center is seeking highly motivated, adaptive, and enthusiastic candidates with a wide variety of interests and a foundation of skills in systems engineering, software engineering, information systems, or data engineering to join our department as a Lead Data Engineer. Candidates should have a strong interest in addressing and solving challenges related to capturing, managing, and sharing data supporting decision making and enabling mission processes.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Working with experienced project teams and data management experts, project tasks may include:
• Leading the development of high quality, high velocity contributions to sponsor challenges and deliverables
• Designing and building prototypes for ingesting, curating, and analyzing data at scale.
• Collecting and preparing data for use by data scientists and analysts
• Leading stakeholder interviews to determine data requirements and define data flows.
• Documenting data transformation rules to meet the requirements for system interfaces and data integration projects
• Performing data profiling to identify quality gaps and determine if data is fit for use for its intended purpose
• Researching and evaluating data engineering tools and technologies

Minimum Qualifications

• 8 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years’ experience; or equivalent combination of related education and work
• Must be able obtaining and maintaining a DoD clearance.
• Strong developer skills using SQL and Python
• Hands‑on experience with one or more database technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, DB2, MongoDB, Neo4j, Couchbase, Cassandra)
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills with ability to describe and present complex technical concepts in relatable terms
• Strong knowledge of ETL/ELT processes, tools, and frameworks
• Experience with large scale data architectures. Activities may include analysis of alternatives, technical product evaluations, requirements analysis, design, data systems prototyping, and process automation.
• Experience building conceptual, logical, and physical data models
• Knowledge of cloud platforms and technologies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
• Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Python, R, Scala, C++, Java, C#, and JavaScript

Data Engineering Skills

• Expertise in preparing data for analysis
• Strong understanding of data science concepts
• Experience with BI tools
• Understanding ML frameworks, algorithms, and libraries
• Applied mathematics: probability and statistics
• Strong innovation, problem‑solving, systems analysis, planning, organizational, and interpersonal skills
• Knowledge of data management practices that align with modern/emerging analytics techniques
• Desire to continuously learn new techniques and evolve approaches by regularly engaging in structured educational pursuits, personal research, and outreach to subject matter experts across the corporation

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, data science, systems engineering, software engineering, or information systems
• Experience migrating legacy data systems to new/modernized platforms
• Hands‑on experience with data flow and pipeline frameworks such as Kafka, NiFi, Spark, Airflow, and Hadoop.
• Familiarity with microservice architectures, data warehousing, data fabric, data lakes, and data mesh
• Understand the use of data in AI/ML and LLM
• Knowledge and experience across data management domains, including data science, data governance, metadata management, data quality, business intelligence, data security & privacy, and data strategy
• Experience performing source to target data mapping
• Knowledge of natural language processing techniques

This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s): None

This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s): Secret

Work Location Type: Hybrid

MITRE is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. MITRE recruits, employs, trains, compensates, and promotes regardless of age; ancestry; color; family medical or genetic information; gender identity and expression; marital, military, or veteran status; national and ethnic origin; physical or mental disability; political affiliation; pregnancy; race; religion; sex; sexual orientation; and any other protected characteristics. For further information please visit the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website EEO is the Law Poster and Pay Transparency.

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