Lead AI & Data Analytics Engineer

Our client is seeking a Lead AI & Data Analytics Engineer to support a federal acquisition process modernization effort. This individual will serve as the technical and functional lead for building AI-enabled analytics products using Palantir Foundry, Microsoft Power Platform, Advana, Jupiter, and Databricks.

This is not a traditional dashboard developer role. The successful candidate must be a self-starter who can engage directly with business stakeholders, understand acquisition and contract writing processes, identify high-value use cases, connect data across platforms, and deliver decision-support capabilities with limited oversight.

The ideal candidate will help the client move from static reporting to integrated, AI-enabled analytics that generate actionable insights, identify risk, improve visibility, and support better acquisition decision-making.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of AI-enabled analytics products supporting acquisition and contract writing operations.
• Build and maintain data products, dashboards, workflows, and analytical applications using Palantir Foundry and Microsoft Power Platform.
• Work within Advana and Jupiter environments to access, analyze, and connect relevant data sources to Palantir Foundry and Power Platform solutions.
• Develop data pipelines, reusable data models, and analytics layers using Databricks, SQL, Python, PySpark, or similar tools.
• Build and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines in Foundry’s Pipeline Builder and Code Repositories — from raw ingest through staging to curated, production-ready datasets
• Design end-to-end big data architectures across cloud implementations of Foundry, including data lakes, pipelines, warehouses, and analytics platforms; apply Foundry’s open architecture principles to ensure interoperability with existing IT systems and meet organizational and compliance requirements
• Integrate AI, machine learning, natural language processing, generative AI, or automated insight-generation capabilities into analytics products and workflows.
• Identify, prioritize, and drive analytics and AI use cases from concept through delivery.
• Partner with acquisition, contracting, program, and technical stakeholders to understand business problems and translate them into data and AI solutions.
• Develop AI-enabled capabilities such as natural language querying, automated leadership summaries, risk indicators, anomaly detection, trend analysis, workload forecasting, and decision-support recommendations.
• Build dashboards and reports that provide insight into contract writing activity, workload, procurement status, cycle times, data quality, system adoption, bottlenecks, and operational risk.
• Support data integration across contract writing, procurement, financial, program, and operational data sources.
• Validate AI-generated outputs against source data, business rules, and subject matter expert feedback.
• Establish standards for data quality, governance, documentation, and responsible AI use.
• Provide technical direction to junior or support-level data analytics staff.
• Present findings, prototypes, dashboards, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in data analytics, data engineering, platform engineering, business intelligence, AI/ML, or analytics product development.
• Experience building analytics products in Palantir Foundry.
• Experience working with Advana, Jupiter, or similar federal/DoD data environments.
• Strong experience with SQL, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Hands-on expertise with one or more modern data engineering, analytics, or data platform technologies (e.g. Databricks, Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, Snowflake, Azure Data Factory, AWS Glue, Apache NiFi, Delta Lake).
• Experience integrating and transforming data from multiple sources and translating business requirements into data products, dashboards, AI use cases, and technical solutions.
• Experience applying AI, machine learning, NLP, generative AI, semantic search, or natural language querying to business or operational data.
• Strong understanding of data governance, data quality, access control, and responsible AI practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead use cases, manage ambiguity, and deliver results with limited oversight.
• Strong client-facing communication skills and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Current U.S. Government Secret clearance
• Experience with Microsoft Power Platform, including Power BI; Power Apps and Power Automate.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Travel

Up to 10% travel , depending on environment cutovers, stakeholder design sessions, and validation/test events.