Junior Data Engineer

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This is not a mass job posting. Only select, high-signal candidates are invited and recommended directly to hiring teams

Hiring Company: AEM Corporation

One-liner: AEM Corporation is a diversified IT and data services firm helping U.S. federal agencies and Fortune 500 organizations modernize systems, harness education data, and strengthen defense missions.

Salary: $120K/yr - $125K/yr

Why Join Us:

• • Diversified IT, data, cybersecurity, and engineering services supporting complex federal agency and Fortune 500 programs.
• • Leading national provider of education data management and visualization for the U.S. Department of Education.
• • Innovation focus spanning AI and automation, including DataWorks Haystack and Appian based federal grants tools.
• • Top Workplaces award winning employer founded in 1986, headquartered in Reston with nationwide project teams.

Role Responsibilities

• • Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable ETL/ELT pipelines and data integration solutions using SQL, Python, and cloud-native services
• • Develop and optimize SQL queries, stored procedures, transformations and data pipelines
• • Design and maintain analytics-ready data models for reporting, dashboards, and downstream applications, including dimensional and semantic modeling patterns
• • Integrate data from databases, flat files, APIs, and third-party systems into governed, reusable datasets
• • Monitor, troubleshoot, and tune data pipelines and database workloads for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• • Establish and maintain data quality controls, including profiling, validation, testing, reconciliation, monitoring, and alerting
• • Operationalize pipelines using CI/CD practices, code review, and environment promotion processes
• • Implement and support orchestration, scheduling, and observability for batch and near-real-time data workflows
• • Support cloud adoption and modernization efforts, including migration of legacy or on-premises data workflows to cloud environments
• • Model and serve data for analytics and BI use cases, including support for Power BI data sets, row-level security, and refresh orchestration
• • Document data lineage, architecture, and data contracts, contributing to metadata/catalog solutions (e.g., Microsoft Purview)
• • Collaborate within a Scrum team, participating in sprint ceremonies and refining user stories with stakeholders
• • Work with business users to gather and translate functional and technical requirements
• • Provide technical assistance and support to education stakeholders (remote and/or on-site)
• • Continuously improve processes through automation, standardization, and best practices

Qualifications

Required

• • Five years experience designing, building, and supporting SQL-based ETL/ELT and data integration solutions
• • Advanced SQL skills, including complex transformations, performance tuning, and working with large datasets
• • Experience with Python for data engineering, automation, data transformation, or data quality workflows
• • Strong experience with data modeling for analytics and reporting, including schema design and dimensional modeling
• • Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms and services; Azure preferred, with AWS or GCP experience also valued
• • Experience helping modernize or migrate data workloads from legacy or on-premises environments to the cloud
• • Experience with orchestration, scheduling, or workflow automation for production data pipelines
• • Experience with version control (Git) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps)
• • Knowledge of data architecture principles (e.g., lakehouse patterns, partitioning, schema design, performance tuning)
• • Experience with automated testing (unit/integration testing for data solutions)
• • Strong understanding of data governance, quality, and lineage concepts
• • Excellent communication, organizational, and time management skills
• • Experience working collaboratively in Agile/Scrum environments
• • Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and/or applying generative AI to improve data engineering, documentation, or analytics workflows

Preferred

• • Experience with .NET / C# for adjacent integration, services, or application development work
• • Experience with dbt for modular data transformations, testing, documentation, and deployment
• • Experience with Azure data services and modern cloud data architectures
• • Experience working with state or local education agencies or education data systems
• • Familiarity with data standards, interoperability, and cross-agency data integration
• • Experience with Microsoft Purview or similar data catalog/lineage tools
• • Experience enabling analytics through Power BI (data modeling, performance optimization, RLS)
• • Experience working with APIs, event-based integrations, or semi-structured data
• • Familiarity with modern data engineering tooling such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Databricks, Spark, Snowflake, or similar platforms
• • Experience with AWS data services (e.g., S3, Glue, Lambda) or multi-cloud environments
• • Demonstrated ability to build strong client relationships and support stakeholder engagement