Senior Data Engineer

CEI; Richmond (VA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

CEI in Richmond, VA is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and optimize enterprise data pipelines and ELT solutions. This role blends hands-on implementation with technical leadership for scalable data processing across analytics and AI/ML use cases.

The candidate will work in a hybrid environment, mentor teams, ensure data quality, security, and governance, and collaborate with governance, DataOps, and architecture groups to advance the data ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Hands-on data engineering with enterprise pipelines.
• Experience building ELT/ETL and streaming solutions.
• Strong SQL and data modeling capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end data pipelines and ETL/ELT solutions for analytics and AI/ML use cases.
• Develop scalable batch and streaming data workflows with low latency.
• Optimize data models, transformations, and performance.
• Prototype and integrate tooling to meet project requirements.
• Ensure pipelines are observability-ready with monitoring and alerts.
• Collaborate with governance, DataOps, and architecture teams.

Skills

Data pipelines

SQL

ETL/ELT

Streaming data

Kafka

Kinesis

Spark Streaming

Data modeling

Performance tuning

Monitoring

Security/governance

Education

Bachelors or higher

CS/IS/Math

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Spark Streaming

Job description

Back Senior Data Engineer

Data & Analytics Richmond , Virginia Contract Hybrid Sep 22, 2026

Data Engineer
Richmond, VA 23219 (hybrid)
Pay: $110,000-120,000

Role Summary

The Senior Data Engineer is a hands-on expert and technical leader, actively engaged in designing, building, and optimizing scalable, reliable data pipelines at an enterprise level. This role not only guides architectural decisions but also directly implements advanced ELT solutions, troubleshoots complex data challenges, and ensures best practices through practical, high-impact contributions.

This role combines deep hands on expertise with technical ownership, mentoring, and architectural alignment. The Senior Data Engineer drives and implements data engineering best practices, ensures high standards for quality and security, and partners with architecture and platform teams to improve the overall data ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end data pipelines and ETL/ELT solutions to support analytics, reporting, and AI/ML use cases, ensuring solutions are robust and production-ready through practical implementation.
• Apply scalable patterns for batch and incremental processing by developing, testing, and deploying data workflows, focusing on hands-on coding and troubleshooting.
• Review and implement data modeling, transformation logic, and performance strategies, using deep technical expertise to optimize and validate solutions.
• Evaluate, select, and integrate tooling, frameworks, and platform capabilities by actively prototyping and configuring systems to meet project requirements.
• Build up complex, high-volume data pipelines using SQL-centric ETL/ELT patterns.
• Design and implement scalable streaming pipelines to process real-time data, ensuring low latency and reliable delivery for analytics and operational use cases.
• Lead performance tuning efforts across pipelines, warehouses, and workloads.
• Ensure data pipelines are resilient, observable, and production ready.
• Implement enterprise-grade error handling, restart ability, and monitoring.
• Build and maintain scalable, low-latency streaming data pipelines using technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, or Spark Streaming
• Perform on-the-fly data cleaning, validation, and enrichment before data reaches its final destination.
• Uses strategies such as Indexing and partitioning to fine tune the data warehouse and big data environments to improve the query response time and scalability
• Implement standards for data quality checks, validation, and reconciliation.
• Ensure pipelines meet security, access control, and governance requirements.
• Partner with governance & DataOps teams on metadata, lineage, and auditability.
• Apply consistent naming conventions, documentation, and coding standards.
• Improve operational monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
• Proactively identify reliability, performance, and cost optimization opportunities.
• Support and guide production troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
• Investigating data quality incidents and identifying design/coding GAPs
• Participate in design and code reviews to enforce quality and best practices.
• Partner with various infrastructure teams, application teams, and architects to generate process designs and complex transformations to various data elements to provide the Business with insights into their business processes.
• Translate ambiguous requirements into well designed technical solutions.
• Work in complex multi-platform environments on multiple project assignments.

Required Years of Experience

• MUST have 5 to 7+ years of Data Engineering experience.

Education

• Education: Bachelors or higher required
• Discipline: Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics

Are there any specific companies/industries you’d like to see in the candidate’s experience?

• High Preference for candidates that have previously worked with a large scale commercial utilities team but will review candidates who have a background with large scale capital projects for companies