Data Engineer, Lead at Booz Allen in McLean, VA

Job description

Data Engineer, Lead The Opportunity: Make enterprise data and knowledge usable, governed, and dependable for AI applications. You will design data architectures and build the pipelines, knowledge indexes, and retrieval services that ground agents in authorized enterprise information. You will work with source-system owners and engineering teams to define data contracts, integrate structured and unstructured sources, and maintain permissions, lineage, quality, and freshness. You will own the reliability of data and retrieval services while partnering with AI engineering on application retrieval behavior and response quality. Architect positions emphasize architecture and governance decisions, and engineer positions emphasize pipeline, connector, and service implementation. Due to the nature of work performed within this facility, U.S. citizen ship is required . Join us. The world can't wait. You Have: Experience designing or implementing enterprise data platforms, Lakehouse architectures, and integrations for structured and unstructured data Experience with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, or vector databases Experience developing, testing, and operating ETL or ELT pipelines in SQL and Python Experience defining data models, schemas, data contracts, APIs, and access patterns that support downstream applications Experience with data governance, source permissions, lineage, quality controls, and monitoring for freshness and availability Knowledge of retrieval augmented generation, embeddings, vector indexes, and semantic or hybrid search Ability to troubleshoot ingestion and retrieval failures, and assess relevance, latency, scalability, and data quality Ability to translate enterprise requirements into architecture decisions, integration standards, and governance patterns Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust or Suitability/Fitness determination based on client requirements Bachelor's degree Nice If You Have: Experience with permission-aware retrieval, met adata enrichment, incremental ingestion, or knowledge engineering Experience delivering reusable customer connectors and data services for production AI applications Vetting: Applicants selected will be subject to a government investigation and may need to meet eligibility requirements of the U.S. government client. Compensation At Booz Allen, we celebrate your contributions, provide you with opportunities and choices, and support your total well-being. Our offerings include health, life, disability, financial, and retirement benefits, as well as paid leave, professional development, tuition assistance, work-life programs, and dependent care. Our recognition awards program acknowledges employees for exceptional performance and superior demonstration of our values. Full-time and part-time employees working at least 20 hours a week on a regular basis are eligible to participate in Booz Allen’s benefit programs. Individuals that do not meet the threshold are only eligible for select offerings, not inclusive of health benefits. We encourage you to learn more about our total benefits by visiting the Resource page on our Careers site and reviewing Our Employee Benefits page. Salary at Booz Allen is determined by various factors, including but not limited to location, the individual’s particular combination of education, knowledge, skills, competencies, and experience, as well as contract-specific affordability and organizational requirements. The projected compensation range for this position is $77,600.00 to $176,000.00 (annualized USD). The estimate displayed represents the typical salary range for this position and is just one component of Booz Allen’s total compensation package for employees. This posting will close within 90 days from the Posting Date. Identity Statement As part of the hiring process, we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identi