Senior Data Engineer (AI)

Location: Washington, D.C.; must be local to the National Capital Region and able to support onsite work at a government facility in Springfield, VA as mission needs increase.

Company

hirify.global delivers secure, cloud-native software delivery and automation solutions for defense, civil agencies, and other mission-focused customers.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines for AI models, agents, and mission applications.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data across relational, document, vector, and graph-oriented technologies.
• Develop ingestion and transformation patterns using Python, SQL, REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and workflow orchestration.
• Establish data quality, validation, provenance, lineage, metadata, schemas, contracts, and operational standards.
• Design secure data access patterns covering identity, authorization, classification, and security boundaries.
• Collaborate with government engineers, AI and platform teams, and commercial technology partners to operationalize data services in Kubernetes/OpenShift, CI/CD, and GitOps environments.

Requirements

• Active TS/SCI clearance required.
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform engineering, or a related field.
• Strong Python and SQL skills with hands-on experience operating production data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows.
• Experience with relational databases, structured and unstructured data, REST APIs, message or event systems, data modeling, governance, lineage, and metadata.
• Experience with cloud-native or containerized environments and Kubernetes/platform engineering teams.
• Must be local to the National Capital Region and able to support onsite work in Springfield, VA.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/ML workloads, RAG, embeddings, vector search, model context, agentic applications, semantic search, or knowledge graphs.
• Experience with Oracle, vector databases, graph databases, document databases, Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows, Kafka, Redpanda, or NATS.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, infrastructure as code, automated CI/CD, disconnected environments, or multiple security domains.
• Familiarity with NIST 800-53, RMF/ATO, zero-trust architectures, UDS, Zarf, Pepr, or Iron Bank.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven work supporting defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage with company-paid premiums, plus an HSA, life insurance, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan, company stock options, and a home office budget.
• Flexible Time Off, federal holidays, extended holiday leave, and paid parental leave.
• Reimbursement for approved training, subscriptions, and conference attendance.