Data Infrastructure Engineer

Data Infrastructure Engineer

Kennesaw State University – Kennesaw, GA

Job  | Regular | Full-Time

Focuses on building and maintaining the data infrastructure including extraction, loading, and staging of data from various data sources, both on‑premises or in the cloud. Ensures seamless, secure transfer of data, optimizing for performance, integration, and reliability to enable subsequent data transformation and modeling for enterprise reporting and analytics.

• Develops, tests, and implements data pipelines to efficiently, securely, and reliably ingest data from various data sources into the enterprise data lake or data warehouse.
• Collaborates with data architects and data source SMEs to understand requirements and design data pipelines accordingly.
• Develops and maintains robust data integrity checks, ensuring data accuracy, timeliness, and consistency.
• Utilizes cloud tools and custom scripts for validation, sets up automated anomaly detection, and collaborates with stakeholders to align quality checks with data requirements.
• Enables integration of data from various data sources, such as databases, cloud services, and APIs, to facilitate seamless data flow for enterprise and self‑service reporting and analytics.
• Monitors and optimizes data pipelines, identifies and troubleshoots issues using tools such as Azure Monitor or similar systems.
• Implements automated alerts and collaborates with architects to adopt best practices in pipeline design for enhanced performance.
• Maintains compliance with data security policies and regulations in the data infrastructure.
• Implements encryption, manages access controls, conducts security audits, and stays updated with security best practices to safeguard data integrity and privacy.
• Manages the storage structure within the data lake or data warehouse, optimizing resource utilization and ensuring efficient integration with data transformation and modeling processes.
• Supports senior technical staff in project planning and the development of standard operating procedures.
• Contributes to the establishment of best practices, ensuring project alignment with technical standards and organizational goals.
• Creates and regularly updates technical documentation for data pipeline processes.
• Ensures clear, comprehensive, and accessible documentation is available, covering all aspects of pipeline design, operation, and maintenance.

Educational Requirements

High school diploma or equivalent

Required Experience

Five (5) years of related IT experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• An undergraduate or advanced degree from an accredited institution of higher education in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or related field.
• Experience working with reporting tools such as Power BI, Tableau, etc.
• Previous work experience in Higher Education.

• Familiarity with data protection and privacy laws and regulations (FERPA, HIPAA, etc.).
• Knowledge of various file formats used in data storage, like parquet, avro, csv, etc., and their implications on performance and storage.
• Understanding of cloud storage services, such as blob storage, data lakes, data lake houses, and data warehouses.
• Understanding of data warehouse architecture patterns (e.g., Medallion Architecture, OBT, Materialized View Pattern, Star‑Schema, etc.).
• Knowledge of data warehousing principles, including data quality, data enrichment, and standardization, and data modeling.
• Knowledge of best practices in data pipelines orchestration.
• Knowledge of data security practices, including encryption/decryption, and compliance with data governance policies and guidelines.

• Excellent interpersonal, initiative, teamwork, problem solving, independent judgment, organization, communication (verbal and written), time management, project management, and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated skills in relational databases (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc.).
• Demonstrated skills in data engineering tools (e.g., Azure Data Factory, SSIS, Informatica, Pentaho, Oracle Data Integrator, etc.).
• Skills in identifying bottlenecks in data pipelines and optimizing for efficiency and…