Principal Data Architect

At MITRE, your passion fuels work that impacts our nation and improves lives. This is where your skills strengthen national security, cybersecurity, health, transportation, and citizen services. We're a nonprofit engineering, applied research, and advanced technology organization working in the public interest. With objectivity and integrity at our core, we lead federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies - collaborating with industry and academia to deliver integrated, high-impact solutions that advance our nation's health, security, and prosperity. Our people tackle the toughest technical challenges, supported by competitive benefits, meaningful career development, and a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Choose MITRE for a career with purpose - and help shape the future.

MITRE's Data Science and Engineering department is looking for qualified applicants to bring their advanced data architecture and data engineering skills to bear on solving problems of critical national importance. MITRE's diverse work program provides opportunities to apply your expertise and creative thinking in challenging domains such as national security, intelligence, transportation, and healthcare. Employees may also participate in MITRE's internal research and development program, which provides funding for innovative applied research that addresses our sponsors' hardest problems.

Roles & Responsibilities:

The successful candidate for this position is a Data Architect who combines strong foundations in data management, data engineering, and software engineering with hands-on experience designing and implementing data systems to solve mission problems. Our organization values innovation and believes that keeping up with the latest research and technologies is essential.

The Data Architect will help our government sponsor establish and evaluate technical and programmatic blueprints and strategies to support the adoption of enterprise-wide data management across the Intelligence Community. The Data Architect will play a critical role in developing policy and strategy, enterprise architecture, and acquisition plans for our government sponsors and provide senior leader decision support.

The successful candidate will serve as a trusted technical advisor and may act as a primary point of contact for senior government sponsors. The candidate will be expected to develop clear, concise, and actionable deliverables; communicate complex technical concepts to senior decision makers; and align state-of-the-art data management capabilities to enterprise-wide mission needs.

The candidate should have hands-on experience in many of the areas specified below:

• Development of enterprise data architectures, data management roadmaps, data strategies, and implementable technical plans.
• Design and evaluation of data schemas, metadata schemas, data workflows, and data integration patterns.
• Alignment of modern data management capabilities to enterprise-wide mission needs.
• Development or assessment of data governance models, stewardship approaches, policies, standards, and operating models.
• Evaluation of technical and programmatic blueprints supporting enterprise-wide data management adoption.
• Translation of mission needs into data architecture recommendations, implementation plans, and acquisition-informed strategies.
• Metadata management, data cataloging, data discovery, and enterprise data inventory approaches.
• Data lineage, provenance, traceability, and auditability across data pipelines and analytic workflows.
• Data quality frameworks, controls, and metrics that improve confidence in enterprise data assets.
• Data and model provenance practices that support trustworthy AI, responsible AI adoption, and senior-leader confidence in analytic outputs.
• Cloud-based data platforms, storage architectures, and data-intensive system design.
• Capacity planning, scalability assessment, and performance considerations for enterprise-scale data systems.
• Understanding of the architectural role, tradeoffs, and fit-for-purpose use of technologies such as: Relational and NoSQL databases; Distributed data processing and analysis tools; Workflow orchestration tools; Object storage (both on-prem and cloud-based solutions); Data Lakehouse platforms, open table formats, and lakehouse patterns; Data cataloging tools.
• Ability to work with engineering teams to translate architecture, policy, and strategy into implementable technical solutions.

Expectations for this position are as follows:

• Leads functional teams or projects with notable risk, complexity, and resource requirements.
• Recognized as a technical expert within Data Engineering and/or Data Management.
• Identifies and resolves complex problems in ways that have lasting impact for an organization.
• Applies expert level of experience and knowledge of theories, practices, and procedures within the Data Management and Data Engineering disciplines and transfers that knowledge to others.
• Communicates complex ideas, anticipates potential objections, and persuades others to adopt a new point of view; Shapes, influences, and persuades others to achieve enterprise-level mission objectives.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or related field with 10 years of relevant experience.
• Active DoD Top Secret / SCI clearance with CI polygraph.
• This position requires 5 days per week on-site.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or related field with 8 years of relevant experience; PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or related field with 5 years of relevant experience.
• Prior experience as a Data Architect or Data Engineer in support of U.S. government organizations.

This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s):
Top Secret/SCI/Polygraph

This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s):
Top Secret/SCI/Polygraph

Salary compensation range and midpoint:
$171,000 - $213,500 - $256,000 Annual

Work Location Type:
Onsite

Commitment to Non-Discrimination

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.

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