Data Engineer

Fairfax County's Department of Information Technology is hiring a Data Engineer for an on-site role in Fairfax, VA. The position offers a competitive salary range of $87,024 to $155,120 per year and the opportunity to shape data pipelines, governance, and architectures within a public sector setting. You will collaborate with analytics and AI teams to deliver scalable, secure data solutions that empower informed decision making and innovation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow or Azure Data Factory, and big data frameworks like Spark and Hadoop to move data from multiple sources into centralized data warehouses and data lakes.
• Manage database and data architecture by designing, implementing, and optimizing storage solutions (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, AWS S3, Google BigQuery), including schemas, partitioning, indexing, and data modeling to balance performance, scalability, and cost for transactional and analytical workloads.
• Ensure data quality, governance, and security through validation rules, anomaly monitoring, metadata and lineage management, compliance frameworks (GDPR, HIPAA), encryption, access controls, and auditing in partnership with security teams.
• Collaborate with business analysts, data scientists, and developers to provide optimized datasets, improve query performance, integrate APIs, and support data projects for decision-making and innovation.
• Build and manage Snowflake data environments, including initial environment setup, warehouse configuration, role-based access controls, data ingestion pipelines, and performance optimization to support scalable, secure, and cost-efficient analytics.
• Support cross-functional teams across data initiatives to advance BI and analytics efforts.
• Perform other duties as required to support business intelligence and data efforts.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer information systems, business administration, or related field; plus five years of experience in information systems and process redesign, managing and implementing all phases of the systems development life cycle, including at least one year of supervisory experience.
• A criminal background check will be required to satisfy the employer.

Technologies

• Apache Airflow
• Azure Data Factory
• Spark
• Hadoop
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• MongoDB
• Cassandra
• AWS S3
• Google BigQuery
• Snowflake

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and maintaining ETL pipelines using Apache Airflow or Azure Data Factory.
• Strong experience with big data frameworks (Spark, Hadoop) and cloud storage (AWS S3, Google BigQuery).
• Experience integrating external data sources via APIs or streaming frameworks into centralized repositories.
• Experience building or optimizing data lakes or data warehouses, including schema design and partitioning strategies.
• Experience implementing data validation rules and anomaly detection to ensure production data quality.
• Experience managing metadata and data lineage to support governance.
• Expertise in relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, governance, and security best practices.
• Proven collaboration with analytics and AI teams, including query optimization and dataset preparation.
• Strong technical communication, problem-solving, and organizational skills.
• Experience working in the public sector.
• Experience working in large-scale data environments.

Physical Requirements

Work is generally sedentary, performed in a normal office environment. All duties performed with or without reasonable accommodations.

Selection Procedure

Panel interview and may include an exercise.