External Title Junior Data Engineer​/Active Secret

Responsibilities

Peraton is seeking a Junior Data Engineer to join its Department of State (DoS) Diplomatic Security Cyber Mission (DSCM) program.

Location:
Beltsville, MD or Washington DC;Flexible for occasional telework; candidate must be local to the work location.

This position will support the Cyber Event Data Node (CEDN), a centralized cloud-based data platform that collects, processes, enriches, normalizes, stores, and distributes cybersecurity data for operational and analytical use.

Peraton's DSCM program provides technical, engineering, data analytics, cybersecurity, management, operational, logistical, and administrative support to protect the Department’s global infrastructure, systems, information, and mobile devices from cyber risks and threats.

In this role, you will:

• Support onboarding new cybersecurity systems and data sources into the CEDN environment.
• Work with system owners, cybersecurity analysts, architects, and engineers to identify source data, collection requirements, formats, schemas, volumes, retention needs, and downstream use cases.
• Configure and maintain Cribl pipelines for data collection, routing, parsing, transformation, enrichment, compression, filtering, and replay.
• Assist with developing and maintaining Databricks data pipelines supporting raw, enriched, and normalized data layers within Delta Lake.
• Develop and maintain Python, SQL, and scripting solutions used to automate data ingestion, transformation, validation, and reporting.
• Map structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data into standardized schemas and security data models.
• Conduct data-quality checks to confirm completeness, accuracy, timeliness, proper formatting, and successful delivery to downstream systems.
• Troubleshoot ingestion failures, malformed events, schema changes, pipeline errors, latency, and other data-flow issues.
• Support integrations with cybersecurity and analytics platforms such as Splunk Cloud, Service Now, Power BI, Tableau, and other authorized consumers.
• Apply appropriate metadata, tagging, access controls, and data-handling requirements to support both classified and unclassified environments.
• Monitor pipeline health, throughput, storage consumption, and processing performance and help identify opportunities for optimization.
• Develop and maintain source-onboarding checklists, data-flow diagrams, interface documentation, configuration records, test plans, standard operating procedures, and troubleshooting guides.
• Participate in testing and validation activities before new data sources are released into production.
• Work within established change-management, configuration-management, security authorization, and system development lifecycle processes.
• Collaborate with senior data engineers, security engineers, data scientists, threat analysts, and mission stakeholders to translate operational needs into reliable data products.
• Support knowledge transfer and provide basic technical guidance to data owners and platform users.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, data science, cybersecurity, engineering, or a related technical field and 1-2 years of experience. Four additional years of relevant experience may be substituted in lieu of a degree.
• Possess or obtain prior to start, and maintain one of the following certifications:
  • CCNA Security, CEH, CISSP, CySA+, GICSP, GSEC, Security+ CE, CND, or SSCP
• Foundational experience with data engineering, data integration, ETL/ELT processes, application integration, or log-management technologies.
• Working knowledge of Python and SQL.
• Familiarity with structured and semi-structured data formats, including JSON, CSV, XML, syslog, and API-delivered data.
• Understanding of databases, data lakes, data…