Job Description
Title : Senior Big Data Engineer Location : Rockville, MD or McLean, VA Target Start Date : ASAP Type : contract Pay Rate : DOE We are seeking a Senior Big Data Engineer who goes beyond task execution and takes ownership of solving complex data challenges. This role requires someone who thinks critically about system design, questions assumptions, and actively contributes to modernizing data platforms. The ideal candidate will design and build scalable, cloud-native data solutions, optimize data platforms for performance and reliability, and support advanced analytics and AI/ML use cases. Key Responsibilities Design and build scalable data lakes and data pipelines on AWS using modern, automated, cloud-native architectures. Enable high-performance analytics through federated query engines such as Amazon Athena and Trino, including large-scale query optimization and tuning. Manage data metadata, schemas, and discovery processes using tools such as AWS Glue Data Catalog. Implement secure data governance and access control using Lake Formation, encryption, and enterprise security best practices. Deploy and manage data workloads on Kubernetes/EKS environments. Work within the Hadoop ecosystem (Spark, Hive, HDFS), applying partitioning strategies and columnar storage formats such as Parquet and ORC to optimize performance. Troubleshoot complex issues across data pipelines, distributed clusters, and query engines. Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for data engineering workflows using tools such as Jenkins or similar platforms. Monitor and maintain data platforms using observability and monitoring tools such as CloudWatch and Grafana. Prepare and structure high-quality datasets to support AI and machine learning applications.