ETL Engineer

Location:

Herndon, Virginia

* Clearance:
* Active TS/SCI w/ Polygraph needed to apply *

Cornerstone Defense is the Employer of Choice within the Intelligence, Defense, and Space communities of the U.S. Government. Realizing early on that our most prized assets are our employees, we continually focus our attention on improving the overall work/life experience they have supporting the mission. Our Team is pushed every day to use their industry leading knowledge to provide end-to-end solutions to combat our nation’s toughest and most secure problems.

If you are looking for a place to not only be professionally challenged, but encouraged and supported by a company that cares, don’t look any further than Cornerstone Defense.

Currently seeking a detail-oriented and experienced ETL Engineer to join our data engineering team. The ideal candidate will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining data pipelines and integration processes that enable reliable, timely, and high-quality data delivery across the organization. This role requires strong technical capabilities, a deep understanding of data architecture, and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP), large-scale data processing, and search/discovery systems, with the ability to lead technical teams and translate mission needs into scalable, production-ready capabilities that deliver operational impact.

Development will take place in an iterative fashion using Agile development methodology with input from all levels of stakeholders. The candidate must have the ability to communicate with project team members, user community, and leadership to assess changes and demonstrate iterative progress.

• Design, develop, and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines that support data warehouse, analytics, and application needs. Must be experienced with large data sets [hundreds of thousands of records, GB and TB size data sets]
• Extract, transform, and load data from various sources into centralized storage solutions.
• Design and enhance search and discovery platforms across large volumes of structured and unstructured data
• Perform data ingestion, ETL, and integration across enterprise and multi-source environments
• Optimize ETL workflows for performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Conduct data validation, profiling, and quality checks to ensure accuracy and completeness.
• Troubleshoot and resolve data inconsistencies, pipeline failures, or performance bottlenecks.
• Build and maintain cloud-native solutions (AWS) aligned to secure and resilient architecture patterns
• Partner with mission operators, analysts, and senior stakeholders to define requirements and deliver mission-relevant analytics
• Translate mission needs into technical designs, architectures, and implementation roadmaps, ensuring alignment to operational objectives
• Deliver clear, compelling visualizations, dashboards, and executive-level briefings that communicate analytic insights and recommendations
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, including hands-on development, code review, and team development
• Own delivery of analytic capabilities from concept through deployment, accreditation, and sustainment
• Support system accreditation, data governance, and security architecture, ensuring data integrity and compliance within classified environments

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Minimum 6-8 years working in Linux Operating system with updating the system for efficient parallel processing, understanding memory, storage and processing data at scale
• Minimum…