Data Platform Engineer

Data Platform Engineer

CohesionForce is actively seeking candidates for a Data Platform Engineer to become part of our team in Huntsville, AL. This individual will design, deploy, and support data services used by engineering applications, automated workflows, analytics, and AI-enabled capabilities. The engineer will provide reliable orchestration, storage, database, lineage, and data-access patterns while making the platform easier for software teams and users to operate.

Responsibilities include:

• Deploy and operate workflow orchestration, object storage, relational database, and graph database services in Kubernetes or OpenShift.
• Build reusable data ingestion, transformation, validation, publication, and access patterns.
• Design data lifecycle, retention, schema migration, backup, restore, and recovery procedures.
• Develop self-service capabilities that allow teams to create and operate repeatable data workflows.
• Implement access controls, service identities, secret handling, and least-privilege data access with identity and platform engineers.
• Diagnose data quality, lineage, workflow, database, storage, performance, and availability issues.
• Automate deployment and configuration using Python, SQL, GitOps, infrastructure as code, Helm, and CI/CD.
• Instrument data services with logs, metrics, traces, health checks, and service-level indicators.
• Develop technical documentation, data contracts, operating procedures, and recovery runbooks.
• Work directly with software, AI, reliability, and customer teams to translate data needs into supportable platform capabilities.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in an engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, information technology or a related discipline, or equivalent experience and combined education, with 5 years of experience, or relevant professional experience; or 3 years with a related Master's degree.
• Experience designing and operating production data platforms or distributed data services.
• Experience with Python, SQL, data modeling, APIs, and automated data workflows.
• Experience with Kubernetes or OpenShift, containers, Linux, and CI/CD.
• Experience with object storage and at least one relational, document, or graph database technology.
• Experience with data quality, lineage, access control, backup, restore, and operational troubleshooting.
• Ability to communicate technical information clearly and document repeatable procedures.
• Works well in a fast-paced collaborative team environment.
• Must be willing to work onsite in a closed/classified area.
• Active Department of Defense (DoD) Secret clearance.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, or a comparable orchestration platform.
• Experience with S3-compatible object storage and distributed storage systems.
• Experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs, provenance, or evidence management.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and database lifecycle automation.
• Experience with Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, Terraform, or Ansible.
• Experience supporting data services in disconnected or access-controlled environments.
• Strong oral and written communication skills.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills.