Senior Data Engineer — Onsite DC, Cloud Lakehouse

Howard University; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vis

PTO, holidays, flexible work

403(b) with company match

Tuition reimbursement and training

Vibrant university culture

Job summary

Howard University seeks a Senior Data Engineer to build and maintain production-ready data infrastructure for institutional analytics and decision-making. You will design ETL pipelines from student systems, admissions, financial aid, ERP, APIs, databases, and flat files to support reporting and analytics.

You will implement cloud-based data lakehouse architectures, data lineage, metadata, data quality, and governance, mentoring analysts and engineers while ensuring FERPA compliance and scalable,

Qualifications

• Advanced proficiency in SQL, Python and/or R with PySpark experience.
• Strong data modeling, relational databases, and ETL/ELT pipeline development.
• Familiarity with cloud data platforms, data lakes, and lakehouse architectures.
• Knowledge of data governance, lineage, metadata, quality, and access control.
• Experience integrating data from APIs, databases, and enterprise systems.
• Familiarity with version control, automated testing, CI/CD, and production deployment.
• Experience with higher education data domains (student, enrollment, finance, HR).
• Ability to deliver analytics-ready datasets for reporting, forecasting, analytics, ML.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with 3–5+ years higher education data experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable ETL/ELT pipelines across multiple institutional sources.
• Develop and maintain enterprise data models, datasets, and transformation logic for reporting.
• Build automated ingestion and delivery pipelines using Python, R, SQL, and PySpark for large datasets.
• Design and support cloud-based data lakehouse architectures and data governance practices.
• Establish data lineage, metadata, dictionaries, and source-to-target mappings.
• Create automated data-quality controls and collaborate with data owners for resolution.
• Optimize pipelines, queries, storage, and distributed processing for performance and cost.
• Support data governance standards including data ownership, access, security, and retention.
• Develop reusable data assets for dashboards, institutional research, forecasting, and analytics.
• Collaborate with offices to translate business requirements into reliable technical solutions.
• Implement monitoring, logging, testing, version control, and documentation for production-grade ops.
• Ensure compliance with FERPA and institutional security policies and privacy requirements.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to analysts and engineers on standards and best practices.

Skills

SQL

Python

R

PySpark

CI/CD

FERPA

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field

Master’s degree in a quantitative field

Tools

CI/CD tooling

FERPA compliance

Job description

Howard University seeks a Senior Data Engineer to build and maintain production-ready data infrastructure for institutional analytics and decision-making. You will design ETL pipelines from student systems, admissions, financial aid, ERP, APIs, databases, and flat files to support reporting and analytics.

You will implement cloud-based data lakehouse architectures, data lineage, metadata, data quality, and governance, mentoring analysts and engineers while ensuring FERPA compliance and scalable,