Principal Engineer Data-19914

0090 CORP-Corporate Office; United States; On-site; USD 98,000 - 148,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life and disability insurance

Savings plan

Paid time off

Job summary

Northrop Grumman is seeking a data-focused engineer to design and maintain production-grade data pipelines and reusable components. You will collaborate with platform engineers and domain teams to understand requirements and translate them into robust pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and publication.

The role demands hands-on experience with modern data platforms, strong software engineering practices, and a keen eye for observability, logging, and metrics to support production readiness.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 5+ years of relevant experience; or a Master's with 3+ years; or a PhD with 1+ years. In lieu of formal degree, 4 additional years of relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government DoD Secret security clearance, with SAP approval within a reasonable period.
• Strong hands-on experience building data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and publishing.
• Experience building and maintaining reusable data engineering components or common implementation patterns.
• Familiarity with integrating data from enterprise systems of record into analytical or operational data pipelines.
• Solid software engineering skills, including version control (Git), code reviews, automated testing, and documentation.
• Strong understanding of databases, pipeline orchestration, and pipeline scripting languages.
• Experience implementing logging, metrics, and error handling in data pipelines for observability.
• Ability to collaborate with platform engineers, domain teams, and stakeholders to translate requirements into robust pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain batch and streaming data pipelines and reusable data engineering components for ingestion, transformation, and publishing.
• Contribute to shared connectors, templates, and configuration-driven patterns supporting systems of record and repeatable implementations.
• Work with platform engineers and domain teams to translate requirements into robust pipelines or reusable components.
• Ensure pipelines are secure, performant, testable, and observable with logging and metrics.
• Contribute to documentation, examples, and proof-of-concept implementations that accelerate delivery.
• Collaborate on data quality, governance to integrate checks and controls into pipelines.

Skills

Data pipelines

Data engineering

Git

Code reviews

Automated testing

Documentation

Databases

Orchestration

Clearance knowledge

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in a STEM field

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

Apache Spark

Delta Lake

Databricks

Snowflake

Airflow

CI/CD

Job description

RELOCATION ASSISTANCE: Relocation assistance may be available CLEARANCE REQUIRED FOR START: No CLEARANCE TYPE: Secret TRAVEL: Yes, 10% of the Time

Description

At Northrop Grumman, our employees have incredible opportunities to work on revolutionary systems that impact people's lives around the world today, and for generations to come. Our pioneering and inventive spirit has enabled us to be at the forefront of many technological advancements in our nation's history - from the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, to stealth bombers, to landing on the moon. We look for people who have bold new ideas, courage and a pioneering spirit to join forces to invent the future, and have fun along the way. Our culture thrives on intellectual curiosity, cognitive diversity and bringing your whole self to work — and we have an insatiable drive to do what others think is impossible. Our employees are not only part of history, they're making history. Join Northrop Grumman on our continued mission to push the boundaries of possible across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Enjoy a culture where your voice is valued and start contributing to our team of passionate professionals providing real-life solutions to our world’s biggest challenges. We take pride in creating purposeful work and allowing our employees to grow and achieve their goals every day by Defining Possible. With our competitive pay and comprehensive benefits, we have the right opportunities to fit your life and launch your career today.

Mission

Build and support production-ready data pipelines and reusable data engineering components that help domain and platform teams ingest, transform, publish, and operate trusted Sentinel data. Relocation assistance may be available for this position.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain batch and streaming data pipelines and reusable data engineering components for ingestion, transformation, and publishing
• Contribute to shared connectors, templates, and configuration-driven patterns that support common systems of record and repeatable implementation approaches
• Work with platform engineers, domain teams, and stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into robust pipelines or reusable components
• Ensure the pipelines and components you build are secure, performant, testable, and observable, with appropriate logging, metrics, and error handling
• Contribute to documentation, examples, and proof-of-concept implementations that help teams adopt common patterns and accelerate delivery
• Collaborate with Data Quality, Governance & Compliance to integrate appropriate checks and controls into pipelines and reusable components
• Support pipeline operations by helping designs integrate cleanly with orchestration, monitoring, incident response, and CI/CD processes

Typical Minimum Education or Experience

• Bachelor's degree with 5+ years of relevant experience; or a Master's degree with 3+ years; or a PhD with 1+ years. In lieu of formal degree, 4 additional years of relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government DoD Secret security clearance, with the ability to obtain and maintain Special Access Program (SAP) approval within a reasonable period of time, as determined by the company to meet its business need.
• Strong hands-on experience building data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and publishing
• Experience building and maintaining reusable data engineering components or common implementation patterns, such as ingestion modules, transformation utilities, shared configuration, or logging patterns
• Familiarity with integrating data from enterprise systems of record into analytical or operational data pipelines
• Solid software engineering skills, including version control (Git), code reviews, automated testing, and documentation
• Strong understanding of databases, pipeline orchestration, and pipeline scripting languages
• Experience implementing logging, metrics, and error handling in data pipelines to support observability and troubleshooting
• Ability to collaborate with platform engineers, domain teams, and stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into robust pipelines or reusable components
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams

Preferred Qualifications

• An active U.S. Government Secret level security clearance (at a minimum), to include a closed investigation date completed within the last 6 years.
• Bachelor's degree in Data Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Systems Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related STEM discipline with 5+ years of relevant experience; or a Master's degree with 3+ years; or a PhD with 1+ years
• Experience contributing to shared data engineering frameworks or building domain-specific pipelines and data products using common platform patterns
• Experience building data pipelines on modern data platforms such as Apache Spark/Delta Lake, Databricks, or Snowflake, including jobs/notebooks and integration with Apache Airflow or similar orchestration tooling
• Understanding of modeling data engineering workflows as DAGs and operating them in production environments
• Familiarity with streaming data processing as well as batch workloads
• Exposure to data quality and governance practices and how they influence data pipeline design
• Experience providing examples, documentation, or internal enablement materials that help other engineers adopt common patterns and capabilities

Primary Level Salary Range

$98,400.00 - $147,600.00 The above salary range represents a general guideline; however, Northrop Grumman considers a number of factors when determining base salary offers such as the scope and responsibilities of the position and the candidate's experience, education, skills and current market conditions. Depending on the position, employees may be eligible for overtime, shift differential, and a discretionary bonus in addition to base pay. Annual bonuses are designed to reward individual contributions as well as allow employees to share in company results. Employees in Vice President or Director positions may be eligible for Long Term Incentives.

Benefits

In addition, Northrop Grumman provides a variety of benefits including health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance, savings plan, Company paid holidays and paid time off (PTO) for vacation and/or personal business.

Application Timeline

The application period for the job is estimated to be 20 days from the job posting date. However, this timeline may be shortened or extended depending on business needs and the availability of qualified candidates.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Northrop Grumman is an Equal Opportunity Employer, making decisions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, or any other protected class. For our complete EEO and pay transparency statement, please visit http://www.northropgrumman.com/EEO.

Civilian Citizenship Requirement

U.S. Citizenship is required for all positions with a government clearance and certain other restricted positions.

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About Northrop Grumman

We are a pioneering company. With careers across all areas: air, cyber, land, sea and space – our 90,000 employees work as one to defend and define the future. Northrop Grumman careers and internships are as varied as your interests, with a lifetime of potential that will give you every opportunity to do your best work. Working together with people from many backgrounds, personal passions and disciplines, we share a drive to push the boundaries of science, technology and engineering to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers worldwide.