Lead Data Engineer

Systems Enginuity, Inc. (SEI) is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to build and lead scalable data processing capabilities for FAA aviation safety research. This role focuses on real-time and batch pipelines, strong data modeling, and technical leadership to support analytics and machine learning workflows using high-volume aircraft trajectory and spatial-temporal data.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable real-time/streaming, incremental, and batch data processing pipelines for aviation safety research and analytics.
• Design and implement data architectures that integrate and synchronize aircraft trajectory, surveillance, operational, environmental, and other spatial-temporal datasets.
• Create data models and processing approaches for aircraft state, trajectory histories, spatial relationships, and derived analytical features.
• Develop and oversee data processing capabilities that deliver reliable, reproducible inputs for trajectory prediction, anomaly detection, machine learning, visualization, and other analytical applications.
• Lead development of APIs, data services, feature pipelines, and interfaces connecting source data, analytical models, enterprise platforms, and user-facing applications.
• Solve engineering challenges related to performance, scalability, data quality, temporal alignment, spatial processing, and data gaps for high-volume trajectory and telemetry data.
• Work closely with data scientists and ML engineers to support training data generation, model evaluation, feature engineering, and near real-time model execution.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, engineering best practices, and mentoring senior and associate engineers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or 6+ years of experience with a Master’s degree.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and SQL, along with current software engineering practices.
• Significant experience with streaming, event-driven, incremental, or distributed data processing architectures.
• Experience with technologies such as Palantir Foundry, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, or comparable technologies.
• Experience processing large-scale time-series, telemetry, sensor, geospatial, or spatial-temporal data.
• Experience working with APIs, databases, cloud platforms, containerized environments, and modern software/data architectures.
• Experience with Java, TypeScript, or other programming languages used in large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience using geospatial libraries and spatial indexing approaches.
• Experience working with aircraft surveillance track data or ADS-B data, trajectory processing, and predictive analytics.
• Aviation, aerospace, transportation, or other safety-critical systems experience.

Technologies

• Python
• SQL
• Palantir Foundry
• Kafka
• Flink
• Spark
• Databricks
• Snowflake
• Java
• TypeScript
• ADS-B

Benefits

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Flexible spending account
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Referral program
• Vision insurance

Interview Process

• SEI states that the interview process should be personal and authentic, and that it does not use AI to conduct interviews.
• Selected candidates will meet directly with Project Engineers and Hiring Managers in a live online interview to assess qualifications, experience, and fit within the data science team and culture.
• To ensure a fair and equitable evaluation process, candidates are asked not to use AI tools or other assistance during interviews.
• SEI intends to evaluate each candidate based on their own knowledge, skills, experience, and problem-solving abilities.

Eligibility Requirements

• Successful completion of a U.S. Federal Government public trust security process is required, including fingerprinting, a government background investigation, and other required screenings.
• Due to FAA contract requirements, applicants must be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident and eligible to satisfy applicable U.S. Federal Government suitability and security requirements.
• SEI is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship for this position.
• Individuals working under or requiring temporary employment authorization, including F 1 CPT, OPT, or STEM OPT, are not eligible.

Compensation and Location

Salary: USD 104,000 - 130,000 per year.

Work location: Remote.