Senior Data Architect for Mission-Critical Analytics

Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation; Colorado Springs (CO); On-site; USD 165,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

On-site in Colorado Springs

Job summary

Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation in Colorado Springs is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, develop, and implement enterprise data architectures and data pipelines to support mission-critical operations.

You will work across cloud and hybrid environments, leveraging data lakes, knowledge graphs, and AI-enabled architectures, coordinating with stakeholders and leaders to deliver actionable insights and robust data governance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field.
• 9+ years of experience in data engineering, architecture, analytics, or AI.
• Experience designing data lakes, data meshes, data warehouses, and knowledge graphs.
• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• Strong collaboration with stakeholders and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical SME for enterprise data architecture, data engineering, and advanced analytics initiatives.
• Translate mission requirements into scalable data pipelines, workflows, and integration solutions.
• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise data architectures supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Develop and implement data models, ontologies, taxonomies, metadata frameworks, and data governance standards.
• Engineer data ingestion, transformation, translation, normalization, and enrichment processes across multiple data sources.
• Design and support data lakes, data meshes, data warehouses, and knowledge graph solutions.
• Develop and maintain metadata tagging strategies to improve data discoverability, lineage, quality, and interoperability.
• Support the integration and transformation of diverse message formats, schemas, protocols, and data standards.
• Design and optimize cloud-native and hybrid-cloud data architectures.
• Evaluate and support AI/ML capabilities including LLMs, Generative AI, agentic architectures, RAG, and knowledge graphs.
• Collaborate with mission stakeholders to identify data requirements and define technical solutions that support operational objectives.
• Develop technical documentation, architecture diagrams, data flows, and implementation strategies.
• Support analytical and decision-support initiatives utilizing complex data sets and predictive insights.
• Prepare technical briefings, reports, and recommendations for government leadership and stakeholders.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend innovative solutions that improve data accessibility, usability, and mission impact.

Skills

Data modeling

Ontologies

Taxonomies

Metadata management

Data transformation

Data integration

Data lakes

Data meshes

Data warehouses

Knowledge graphs

LLMs

Agentic architectures

AI/ML initiatives

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related discipline

Tools

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud Platform

Job description

Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation in Colorado Springs is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, develop, and implement enterprise data architectures and data pipelines to support mission-critical operations.

You will work across cloud and hybrid environments, leveraging data lakes, knowledge graphs, and AI-enabled architectures, coordinating with stakeholders and leaders to deliver actionable insights and robust data governance.