AWS Data Engineer

Job Title: AWS Data Engineer
Location: McLean, VA
Type: Contract-to-Hire
Compensation: $ - $
Work Model: Remote - offsite
Security Clearance: US Citizen with the ability to obtain a public trust

System One is looking for a strong AWS Data Engineer for a remote contract-to-hire position. While this position is remote, preference is given to those who are located in the Washington, DC Metro in case the team needs to meet in person.

• Build and operate data pipelines (batch and streaming) from various sources including APIs, relational databases, file drops, event streams, and external partners.
• Design, implement, and optimize ETL/ELT pipelines using Python and PySpark to produce analytics-ready datasets for reporting, visualization, and machine learning.
• Implement incremental processing, change data capture (CDC), data contracts, schema validation, and reusable transformation frameworks.
• Improve pipeline reliability through automated testing, orchestration, monitoring, retry handling, and operational runbooks.
• Build and manage a scalable lakehouse on Amazon S3 using Apache Iceberg and open columnar formats such as Apache Parquet.
• Implement SQL-like table reliability features including ACID transactions, schema evolution, partition evolution, snapshot isolation, time travel, and rollback capabilities.
• Enable fast, interactive querying of lakehouse data using AWS-native query and compute services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Amazon Redshift.
• Optimize performance and cost efficiency through partitioning, compaction, file sizing, caching, lifecycle policies, and efficient compute/storage separation.
• Establish standardized development, testing, and production environments with consistent configuration and controlled promotion across stages.
• Implement data governance and fine-grained access control utilizing AWS-native services like AWS Lake Formation, AWS Glue Data Catalog, IAM, KMS, and related security tools.
• Create a managed metadata repository for dataset cataloging, ownership, tagging, classification, and discoverability.
• Support end-to-end data lineage for source, transformation, and consumption to facilitate auditability and impact analysis.
• Apply security policies such as least privilege access, data classification, encryption, retention, and secure data handling.
• Build operational data quality checks for metrics such as freshness, completeness, validity, and anomaly detection, along with publishing SLAs/SLOs.
• Implement automated AWS provisioning through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure consistent, secure environments.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines for data workflows and lakehouse components, including automated testing, security validation, packaging, deployment, promotion, and rollback.
• Maintain observability with centralized metrics, logs, traces, alerts, dashboards, runbooks, and incident response procedures.
• Continually evaluate platform performance, scalability, reliability, security, and cost, and implement measurable improvements.
• Collaborate closely with data, application, analytics, AI/ML, security, networking, and cloud platform teams to support mission-critical requirements.
• Maintain high-quality documentation including architecture diagrams, SOPs, data models, interface specs, and operational runbooks.
• Present technical findings, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations clearly to stakeholders.

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or four (4) years of equivalent practical experience.
• Six (6) years of relevant hands‑on experience in data engineering.
• Extensive experience designing, implementing, and operating AWS-native data lake or lakehouse architectures with Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon Redshift.
• Proven ability developing production ETL/ELT pipelines using Python and PySpark, including data modeling, transformation, tuning, and error handling.
• Hands‑on experience with Apache Iceberg covering ACID transactions, snapshots, schema evolution, and query optimization.
• Advanced SQL skills supporting analytical queries, reporting, and data visualization workloads.
• Demonstrated experience with data governance, cataloging, lineage, ownership, classification, and access controls.
• Knowledge of AWS security fundamentals including IAM, encryption (KMS), secrets management, and network security.
• Experience provisioning resources via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and managing…