Ab Initio Data Engineer

Job Title: Ab Initio Data Engineer

Location: Berkeley Heights, NJ (5 days onsite — flexibility to support weekends)

Job Type: Contract

Experience: 7+ years ETL development; 5+ years Ab Initio in production

Job Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled Ab Initio Data Engineer to design and implement high-performance, event-driven data pipelines for a large credit card processing system. You will work within the Ab Initio ecosystem to build stateful services that ingest, filter, and transform data from Kafka and message queues, pushing near-real-time updates to dashboards and downstream databases.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain complex ETL graphs using Ab Initio GDE
• Architect end-to-end data integration solutions spanning multiple source/target systems: RDBMS, mainframe, flat files, message queues
• Optimize graph performance — parallelism, partitioning, layout tuning, checkpointing
• Own metadata management and data lineage within EME
• Design and implement CDC and near-real-time data pipelines
• Troubleshoot production job failures and perform root-cause analysis
• Define coding standards and review peer-developed graphs
• Mentor junior and mid-level Ab Initio developers
• Collaborate with data architects, DBAs, and business analysts on technical design

Required Skills

• 7+ years ETL development experience; 5+ years specifically in Ab Initio
• Strong hands-on expertise with Ab Initio GDE, Co>Op, EME, and Conduct>It
• Deep understanding of parallel processing and Ab Initio partitioning/multi-file system (MFS)
• Strong SQL and experience with DB2 and major RDBMS platforms
• Unix/Linux shell scripting experience
• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts: dimensional modeling, SCDs, star/snowflake schemas
• Experience with Apache Kafka
• Strong debugging and performance-tuning skills for large-volume data processing

Preferred Skills

• Experience with mainframe data integration: COBOL copybooks, VSAM, flat files
• Exposure to Kubernetes and OpenShift
• Familiarity with Hadoop/Spark ecosystems and hybrid ETL architectures

Location & Work Model

Berkeley Heights, NJ — fully onsite, 5 days per week. Candidates must be flexible to support weekend operations when needed.

Engagement Details

 

3 openings available. Contract engagement. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field required.