Principal Data Lead

Location: Primarily remote, but candidates must reside in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, or Northern Virginia area; occasional onsite attendance in Baltimore, Maryland, is required.

Salary: $174,300–$205,900 USD annually, with a midpoint of $190,100.

Company

Technology solutions firm connecting strategy and execution across AI, cloud, data, product development, and emerging technology for client organizations.

What you will do

• Lead execution of data strategy across a large, multi-domain federal healthcare program.
• Establish data supply chain, metadata, governance, trusted-data promotion, and data quality practices.
• Coordinate priorities and decisions across source-system teams, data owners, engineering teams, and program stakeholders.
• Provide senior oversight for Databricks, Spark, Python, SQL, workflows, schema design, optimization, and pipeline reliability.
• Guide Unity Catalog, machine-readable documentation, lineage, and data discoverability practices.
• Translate program objectives into data standards, roadmaps, operating practices, and measurable outcomes while driving risks and quality issues to resolution.

Requirements

• Experience leading enterprise data strategy, governance, data quality, or data management in complex environments.
• Experience coordinating data decisions across multiple source systems, data domains, and stakeholder groups.
• Strong understanding of modern data engineering, metadata management, lineage, schema design, and reliable data pipelines.
• Experience establishing standards and governance processes that improve data trust, quality, documentation, and reuse.
• Ability to lead through influence and communicate complex data concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Experience operating at a principal, enterprise, or program leadership level.

Nice to have

• Experience in federal healthcare, public-sector healthcare, or similarly regulated data environments.
• Experience with Databricks, Spark, Python, SQL, Unity Catalog, machine-readable documentation, and end-to-end data lineage.
• Experience leading data governance or modernization across multiple teams or delivery workstreams.
• Experience with client presentations, solution reviews, or proposal oral presentations.

Culture & Benefits

• Primarily remote work with occasional onsite program activities.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage may be available.
• Flexible Spending Account and 401(k) retirement plan.
• Paid time off, parental leave, and professional growth opportunities.