Technical Architect - Data

Overview

We are looking for a seasoned Data Technical Architect to work with our team and our clients to design, architect, and implement enterprise-grade data platforms, services, pipelines, data models, visualizations, and advanced analytics solutions. The Data Technical Architect must be a technologist with excellent communication and customer service skills and a passion for data, innovation, and problem solving. This role spans the full data lifecycle, including data architecture, data engineering, analytics, AI/ML enablement, and cloud platform modernization. The ideal candidate will provide technical leadership in defining enterprise data strategies, architecting scalable data solutions, and guiding teams through successful implementation.

Contributions

Responsibilities include:

• Design greenfield data solution stacks in the cloud or on-premises using modern data services, technologies, and industry best practices.
• Architect the migration and modernization of legacy data environments with a focus on scalability, performance, reliability, and security.
• Define enterprise data architecture standards, integration patterns, and technical roadmaps supporting business and mission objectives.
• Design conceptual, logical, and physical data models to support transactional, analytical, and AI/ML workloads.
• Assess and understand data sources, data models, schemas, data quality requirements, and data workflows to support enterprise data initiatives.
• Assess, understand, and design ETL/ELT processes, data pipelines, orchestration workflows, and data integration solutions.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide technical oversight to engineering teams implementing data solutions.
• Establish data governance, metadata management, data quality, data lineage, and security best practices across enterprise data platforms.
• Assess, understand, and design reporting solutions, business intelligence architectures, data visualization strategies, and executive dashboards.
• Evaluate and recommend BI and analytics platforms, ensuring alignment with business and technical requirements.
• Assess, understand, and design machine learning and AI solutions, MLOps pipelines, and supporting infrastructure for data science teams.
• Address technical inquiries concerning customization, integration, enterprise architecture, and the functionality of data products and platforms.
• Design and implement cloud-based data lakehouse architectures leveraging AWS services or equivalent Azure and GCP technologies.
• Architect solutions involving relational databases, data warehouses, data lakes, streaming platforms, and distributed data systems.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, engineers, data scientists, and business teams to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Support Agile software development lifecycles and modern DevSecOps, DBOps, and MLOps practices.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance to project teams.
• Contribute to the growth and advancement of our AI & Data Exploitation Practice.

Qualifications

• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the U.S. Government.
• Bachelor's degree and 10+ years of relevant experience.
• 5+ years of experience designing and architecting enterprise-scale data platforms, data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouse solutions.
• 5+ years industry experience developing commercial software and solving complex technical challenges.
• 5+ years direct experience delivering enterprise data solutions with technologies such as:
  • Big Data Technologies: Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Databricks, or other distributed data processing platforms.
  • Databases: Relational databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. NoSQL databases including MongoDB and similar technologies.
  • Data Integration & Orchestration: Airflow, NiFi, or other worklfow orchestration and pipeline management platforms.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS services such as EC2, EMR, RDS, Redshift, Glue, SageMaker and related analytics services or equivalent Azure and GCP services.
  • Streaming Technologies: Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Event Hubs, or similar real-time streaming technologies.
  • Data Science & Analytics: Python, R, Databricks or Data preparation, analysis, and machine learning libraries.
  • Search Technologies: Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene.
  • Programming Languages: Python, Java, Scala, C++, or other object-oriented and scripting languages.
• Advanced SQL expertise including query authoring, optimization, performance tuning, and complex data analysis.
• Experience developing conceptual, logical, and physical data models.
• Experience defining enterprise data architecture standards, governance frameworks, and integration patterns.
• Experience architecting transactional systems, data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouse environments.
• Experience with DBOps, MLOps, DevOps, and CI/CD practices.
• Experience with message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable data platforms.
• Experience working with large-scale structured and unstructured datasets.
• Experience manipulating, processing, and extracting value from complex, disconnected datasets.
• Experience constructing complex analytical queries and performing data analysis in modern data processing environments.
• Experience with data modeling tools, methodologies, and best practices.
• Experience aggregating and integrating information from multiple data sources for reporting and analytics.
• Experience leading technical design sessions and architecture reviews with stakeholders and engineering teams.
• Experience supporting project teams of engineers, developers, analysts, and data scientists building dashboards, reports, analytics solutions, and machine learning models.
• Experience working in Agile development environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Local to the Washington, DC metro area preferred

About steampunk

Steampunk relies on several factors to determine salary, including but not limited to geographic location, contractual requirements, education, knowledge, skills, competencies, and experience. The projected compensation range for this position is $180,000 to $225,000. The estimate displayed represents a typical annual salary range for this position. Annual salary is just one aspect of Steampunk's total compensation package for employees. Learn more about additional Steampunk benefits here.

Identity Statement

As part of the application process, you are expected to be on camera during interviews and assessments. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud.

Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology, we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges. As an employee owned company, we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers - and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com .

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Steampunk participates in the E-Verify program.