Data Analyst III

Job Announcement

Join the Fairfax County Park Authority (FCPA) and our nationally recognized team of professionals! We are seeking an experienced data warehouse administrator to be a part of one of the most highly regarded park systems in the country. With more than 25,000 acres of parkland, nine Rec Centers, eight golf courses, three lakefront parks, and more, FCPA is an exciting organization to be a part of and there are many opportunities for staff to make a difference at every level. Under limited supervision of the IT Program Manager, serves as the senior developer and administrator for the Park Authority's data warehouse. Defines requirements, designs, develops, tests, debugs, and maintains the agency's data warehouse, associated system interfaces, and business intelligence solutions. Ensures data integrity, availability, security, and reliable backups are performed. Facilitates data sharing with remote systems and agency transactional systems. Plans, evaluates, and implements new database systems or upgrades to existing solutions that enhance operational and administrative functionality for the agency. Meets with customers to determine system needs during implementations, system upgrades, or enhancements. Ensures data within the data warehouse is structured appropriately for use in agency business intelligence tools and reports. Maintains database technology refresh schedule for the agency. Creates and maintains data governance policies and best practices for the agency. Maintains appropriate access to sensitive or legally protected data. Organizes, prepares, and maintains system documentation. Provides technical support to users and responds to ad hoc data requests.

Key Responsibilities

• Manages database and data architecture by designing, implementing, and optimizing storage solutions, including schemas, partitioning, indexing, and data modeling to balance performance, scalability, and cost for transactional and analytical workloads.
• Defines requirements, designs, develops, tests, debugs, and maintains the agency's data warehouse and associated system interfaces to data sources.
• Designs, builds, and maintains ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines using orchestration tools (e.g., Apache Airflow, Azure Data Factory, FME Form) and big data frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hadoop) to transport raw data from multiple sources into a centralized data warehouse.
• Collaborates with business analysts, data analysts, GIS analysts, and subject matter experts to design and provide optimized datasets to meet agency business needs and enable data-informed decision making.
• Creates and maintains data governance policies and best practices in accordance with the Department of Information Technology (DIT) to ensure consistency across agencies. Writes agency policy and best practice documentation that determines data design, data quality, data transformation, data retention, data sharing and data security standards, in alignment with enterprise standards set by DIT.
• Ensures data quality and adherence to data governance and security policies through validation rules, monitoring, and database design. Ensures compliance with all regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and HIPAA.
• Performs other duties as required to support business intelligence and data efforts.

Illustrative Duties

(The illustrative duties listed in this specification are representative of the class but are not an all-inclusive list. A complete list of position duties and unique physical requirements can be found in the position job description.)

• Mentors the work of lower-level data analysis, providing work counseling, guidance, and training as needed;
• Develops data standards, analytic schemas, and complex data models to ensure complete, correct, accessible and shareable data for information technology development projects;
• Gathers and documents business data, information, physical, and analytics requirements;
• Develops logical business models;
• Prepares physical database design and consolidation, standardization, cleansing, migration, or upload of data;
• Assists with planning and facilitating user requirement sessions for data analysis, data standardization, and data ownership;
• Analyzes business forms, reports, processes, practices, and procedures;
• Designs reporting schemas and data models of moderate to advanced scope and complexity Identifies and documents data subject areas, data entities, attributes, relationships, information types, domains, and constraints;
• Develops structured diagrams, including data flow, entity life cycle, hierarchy, entity/relationships, conceptual schemas, and association matrix diagrams;
• Assesses disparate databases for streamlining, standardization, and consolidation opportunities, designing appropriate schemas to enable modernization or optimization;
• Assists with identifying physical implementation requirements such as denormalization, data types, defaults, keys, transformations, referential integrity, and screen/script mapping;
• Assists with coordinating the development of shared information assets including logical data standards, definition standards, domain, and type standards, and with the resolution of related conflicts;
• Provides key input to the development of the corporate information architecture, policies, and methodologies;
• Maintains metadata, schemas, data repositories, and data dictionaries;
• Assists with the selection, implementation, guidance and training of data administration practices, data access and CASE tools;
• Designs and runs database queries to assess or validate data;
• Performs data cleansing and transformations to assess data quality;
• Supports data testing and analysis for initiatives of high complexity;
• Attends training workshops, product demonstrations, conferences, technical briefings, and conventions;
• Serves on committees and task forces;
• Undertakes special projects;
• Stays abreast of technology changes;
• Provides assistance to other staff, as needed.

Required Knowledge Skills and Abilities

(The knowledge, skills and abilities listed in this specification are representative of the class but are not an all-inclusive list.)

• Considerable knowledge of information systems and the components that process data; Considerable knowledge of the principles, practices, and methods related to information architecture;
• Considerable knowledge of data administration areas such as policies and standards, data definition, modeling and logical design, database design, and quality control; Considerable knowledge of data concepts such as syntax, taxonomy, and hierarchy; Considerable knowledge of relational databases (such as Oracle or DB2) Knowledge of business intelligence solutions or data-related CASE and modeling tools;
• Knowledge of data modeling mapping, cleansing, extraction, exchange, manipulation, and load principles;
• Extensive knowledge of business process analysis and redesign;
• Some knowledge of business intelligence and information system design principles;
• Some knowledge of services-oriented architecture, object-oriented application development, data integration, data exchange protocols, or XML schema design;
• Skill in brainstorming, presenting, sharing, discussing, and defending ideas;
• Skill in problem-solving, with appreciation and respect for diversity of differing professional views;
• Skill in leading meeting participants toward consensus;
• Skill in designing and presenting conforming, efficient, and unambiguous models and diagrams of complex reporting and information systems;
• Skill in applying work and ideas to advance enterprise architecture goals and objectives: Ability to establish and maintain effective business relationships;
• Ability to help stakeholders effectively resolve issues related to cross-agency data sharing, usage conflicts, and data inconsistencies;
• Ability to follow special formatting requirements and conventions in work products;
• Ability to establish and maintain appropriate version control over work products; Ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing;
• Ability to make use of provided resources and seek guidance as needed;
• Ability to analyze and evaluate administrative processes and procedures for data analysis purposes;
• Ability to conduct research into new information technology;
• Ability to prepare essential task deliverable and documentation;
• Ability to translate technical terminology into simple language and concepts;
• Ability to train employees in the use of data access tools.

Employment Standards

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
Any combination of education, experience, and training equivalent to the following:
(Click on the aforementioned link to learn how Fairfax County interprets equivalencies for "Any combination, experience, and training equivalent to")
Graduation from an accredited four-year college or university with a degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science, Business Administration, or related field and coursework in analytics, biosystematics, biology, information architecture, engineering, library science, statistics, sociology, demographics, and/or marketing, Plus five years analysis of data and information experience in an academic, data administration, or business data analytics environment that involves using data modeling, database consolidation, ad hoc query, or business intelligence tools, relational databases, metadata, XML schema design, and/or taxonomy.

CERTIFICATES AND LICENSES REQUIRED:
Driver's License (Required)

NECESSARY SPECIAL REQUIREMENT:
The appointee to the position will be required to complete a criminal background check and driving record check to the satisfaction of the employer.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• 3-5+ years working in data warehousing or database development and maintenance.
• Strong experience with ETL tools and experience building and optimizing data pipelines.
• Experience with transactional database platforms (SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL)
• Experience with cloud data warehousing platforms (e.g., Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery).
• Experience with governance frameworks, lineage, and metadata management.
• Proven collaboration skills with analytics/AI teams, including query optimization and dataset preparation.
• Excellent technical communication, problem-solving, and organizational skills.
• Experience in public sector or large-scale data environments.

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:
Mostly sedentary with walking and lifting up to 10 lbs. All duties may be performed with or without reasonable accommodations.

SELECTION PROCEDURE:
Panel interview; may include exercise.

Fairfax County is home to a highly diverse population, with a significant number of residents speaking languages other than English at home (including Spanish, Asian/Pacific Islander, Indo-European, and many others.) We encourage candidates who are bilingual in English and another language to apply for this opportunity.

Fairfax County Government prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, age, marital status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetics, political affiliation, or military status in the recruitment, selection, and hiring of its workforce.

Reasonable accommodations are available to persons with disabilities during application and/or interview processes per the Americans with Disabilities Act. TTY View phone number on click.appcast.io.View email address on click.appcast.io/AA/TTY. #LI-SP1