Data Architect (Washington DC-Baltimore Area)

About the Program

Softek is recruiting for a program supporting the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS/CISA). The program delivers AI/ML-enabled applications, automation, and cloud data engineering on an AWS and Databricks platform, with an emphasis on secure, vendor-agnostic design. Work is performed remotely from the contractor site with occasional travel to the Washington, DC area.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technical lead for enterprise data architecture, governance, lineage, and AI-ready data models.
• Design conceptual, logical, and physical data models, metadata standards, and governed Lakehouse structures.
• Architect and optimize Databricks pipelines (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, ETL/ELT) and AWS-native data services.
• Define data quality, lineage, and access controls that keep unapproved data out of AI/ML pipelines.

Required Qualifications

• Ten or more years of enterprise data architecture, data engineering, or large-scale analytic database design.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, information systems, or engineering, or 15 years of progressive experience.
• Hands-on experience architecting Databricks pipelines (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Lakehouse).
• Experience designing cloud-native data architectures on AWS (S3, IAM, KMS, Lambda, Glue, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora).
• At least one AWS certification (Solutions Architect Associate or Professional, Data Engineer, or equivalent).
• Experience with data governance, lineage, metadata standards, semantic models, and streaming or API-based data exchange.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior DHS or federal data modernization experience.

Benefits

Softek offers compensation at par with the industry, medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match, paid time off and federal holidays, and support for professional certifications and training. Softek is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All positions require U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a DHS suitability determination.