Data Engineer

Fairfax County's Department of Information Technology offers a stable, public-sector role with a strong emphasis on data-driven decision making. This onsite opportunity in Fairfax, VA provides a competitive salary range of USD 87,024 - 155,120 per year, a collaborative culture, and a chance to impact the community by delivering secure, scalable data solutions. You will work with analytics and AI teams to design and deploy robust data platforms that support decision making and innovation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow and Azure Data Factory, along with big data frameworks like Spark and Hadoop, to move data from multiple sources into centralized stores like data warehouses and data lakes.
• Plan and optimize database and data architectures by designing storage solutions (including PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, AWS S3, Google BigQuery), covering schemas, partitioning, indexing, and data modeling for performance, scale, and cost.
• Maintain data quality, governance, and security through validation rules, anomaly detection, metadata and lineage management, and adherence to compliance frameworks (GDPR, HIPAA), with encryption, access controls, and auditing in partnership with security teams.
• Collaborate with business analysts, data scientists, and developers to provide optimized datasets, improve query performance, integrate APIs, and support data projects for decision-making and innovation.
• Build and manage Snowflake environments, including initial setup, warehouse configuration, RBAC, data ingestion pipelines, and performance optimization to enable scalable, secure, and cost-efficient analytics.
• Coordinate across cross-functional teams to support data initiatives and ensure alignment with broader BI and data efforts.
• Perform additional duties as needed to sustain and advance business intelligence and data initiatives.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer information systems, business administration, or a related field, plus five years of experience in information systems and process redesign, with experience managing and implementing all phases of the systems development life cycle, including at least one year in a supervisory role.
• An associated criminal background check will be required and must be satisfactory to the employer.

Technologies

• Apache Airflow
• Azure Data Factory
• Spark
• Hadoop
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• MongoDB
• Cassandra
• AWS S3
• Google BigQuery
• Snowflake

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and maintaining ETL pipelines using Apache Airflow or Azure Data Factory.
• Strong background with big data frameworks (Spark, Hadoop) and cloud storage (AWS S3, Google BigQuery).
• Experience integrating external data sources via APIs or streaming frameworks into centralized repositories.
• Experience building or optimizing data lakes or data warehouses, including schema design and partitioning strategies.
• Experience implementing data validation rules and anomaly detection to ensure production data quality.
• Experience managing metadata and data lineage to support governance.
• Expertise in relational and NoSQL databases, data modeling, governance, and security best practices.
• Proven ability to collaborate with analytics and AI teams, including query optimization and dataset preparation.
• Strong technical communication, problem-solving, and organizational skills.
• Experience working in the public sector and in large-scale data environments.

Physical Requirements

Work is generally sedentary and performed in a standard office environment. Duties may be performed with or without reasonable accommodations.

Selection Procedure

Panel interview and may include a practical exercise.