Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

Software Guidance & Assistance, Inc., (SGA), is searching for a Senior Data Engineer for a contract assignment with one of our premier Regulatory clients in Tysons, VA or Rockville, MD. We are looking for a hands-on Senior Data Engineer to develop and maintain an engineering metrics and analytics platform. The platform integrates data from multiple engineering systems, including Jira, Bitbucket, GitLab, Jenkins, deployment systems, and Splunk. The candidate must be capable of independently understanding complex datasets, building reliable data pipelines, identifying and resolving data quality issues, performing analytics, and delivering dashboards or lightweight applications to present actionable engineering insights. This is a hands-on engineering role requiring strong technical skills, analytical thinking, ownership, and the ability to guide junior team members.

Required Skills

• Ideally 5–8+ years of relevant hands-on experience, with demonstrated senior-level ownership of data engineering and analytics solutions.
• Data Engineering
• Strong Python programming and advanced SQL skills.
• Experience building ETL/ELT pipelines to integrate multiple data sources.
• Experience with data transformation, aggregation, data modeling, and pipeline optimization.
• Knowledge of REST APIs, authentication, pagination, rate limits, and error handling.
• Experience handling large datasets, incremental loads, and changing source schemas.
• Data Quality and Reliability
• Experience implementing automated data validation and reconciliation.
• Ability to identify missing, duplicate, inconsistent, and inaccurate records.
• Experience investigating root causes of data discrepancies.
• Ability to build data-quality checks, exception reports, monitoring, and alerting.
• Understanding of data lineage, metric definitions, and data consistency across source systems.
• Data Analytics
• Ability to analyze complex datasets and independently derive meaningful insights.
• Experience defining and calculating KPIs using clear, consistent business rules.
• Ability to investigate unexpected metrics and distinguish genuine trends from data issues.
• Strong analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills.
• Dashboard and Application Development
• Experience developing interactive dashboards using Quick, Grafana, Splunk, Power BI or custom webapp, or a comparable tool.
• Ability to build appropriate visualizations, filters, drill-downs, and trend analysis.
• Experience developing lightweight data applications using Python frameworks such as Streamlit or Dash, or an equivalent technology, where required.
• Engineering Practices and Ownership
• Strong debugging, code review, testing, documentation, and version control practices.
• Ability to work independently with ambiguous requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Experience mentoring junior developers and establishing reusable engineering standards.
• Ability to explain technical findings and data-quality issues clearly to stakeholders.

Preferred Skills

• Integration with Jira, Bitbucket, GitLab, Jenkins, Splunk, and deployment systems.
• Understanding of software delivery lifecycle metrics, including DORA metrics.
• Experience with cloud platforms, workflow orchestration, and production data pipeline monitoring.
• Experience supporting engineering productivity, DevOps analytics, or developer experience initiatives.

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