Senior Data Engineer

RS21 is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain data foundations for analytics, AI, and LLM-driven applications across product and professional services work. The role leads data pipeline architecture and cloud-native data delivery, enables AI use cases, and provides technical leadership, client engagement, and mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Lead pipeline architecture decisions for assigned workstreams, including batch and real-time ingestion, transformation, and delivery to analytics and AI layers
• Design, build, and maintain scalable ETL/ELT workflows with strong data quality, lineage, monitoring, and observability built in from the start
• Establish data contracts and pipeline standards for the projects you own, and ensure those standards are followed by other contributors on the workstream
• Ensure data reliability, performance, and scalability across platforms; proactively surface bottlenecks and recommend improvements before they affect delivery
• Support both batch and streaming ingestion patterns, including real-time data pipeline design and implementation
• Design and implement data pipelines that support LLM and AI use cases, including:
• Document and unstructured data ingestion
• Data preprocessing, enrichment, and embedding generation
• Vector store integration and retrieval-optimized data structures
• Lead embedding pipeline architecture and vector store configuration in collaboration with developers building LLM features
• Ensure data freshness, lineage, and governance for AI-powered systems
• Optimize data structures and retrieval patterns to support efficient LLM context usage
• Contribute to RAG pipeline design and maintain awareness of foundation model data requirements across active engagements
• Architect and provision AWS services to support data and AI workloads, including S3, Glue, Glue Catalog, Redshift, Athena, EMR, Kinesis, MSK, Lambda, Step Functions, and EventBridge
• Lead FedRAMP-compliant architecture design for data environments where required; apply security and access control patterns using Lake Formation and IAM
• Contribute to reusable reference architectures for data lakes, warehouses, streaming systems, and AI-ready platforms
• Partner with platform and DevOps teams to ensure secure, cost-effective, and scalable cloud deployments
• Apply infrastructure-as-code and automation practices to data platform provisioning and maintenance
• Participate in client discovery and requirements-gathering sessions, translating operational needs into concrete data architecture recommendations
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, adapting depth and language to the audience without losing precision
• Assess and document client data readiness for analytics and AI adoption; identify gaps and propose remediation paths to the lead architect or engagement manager
• Support the technical narrative during delivery, contributing to solution design documents, architecture diagrams, and client-facing documentation
• Build working trust with client counterparts through consistency, follow-through, and clear expectation-setting
• Own the data engineering workstream within a project delivery plan, including task decomposition, estimation, and sequencing in Jira
• Understand how individual tickets connect to the larger delivery arc, and surface dependencies or risks before they block progress
• Facilitate technical planning and review ceremonies for the data workstream; provide clear updates to project managers and technical leads
• Partner with project managers and product owners to keep the data engineering track aligned with contractual and delivery constraints
• Coordinate across engineering, platform, analytics, and ML teams to ensure data pipelines meet downstream requirements
• Support the evolving data architecture behind RS21 product capabilities, including predictive and real-time ML systems
• Assess and improve internal and client data readiness for analytics and AI adoption
• Translate business, product, and client needs into scalable data architectures that can be maintained and extended by the broader team
• Document data architectures, pipeline designs, and integration patterns to support transparency and reuse across engagements
• Mentor junior and core-level data engineers through code reviews, architecture critiques, and hands-on guidance on active projects
• Identify skill gaps in team members and work with technical leadership to address them through structured coaching or pairing
• Contribute to internal playbooks, onboarding materials, and engineering standards that reduce tribal knowledge and improve team consistency
• Help team members understand the business context behind their work, connecting individual tasks to client outcomes and RS21's technical strategy
• Collaborate closely with developers building LLM features to ensure data pipelines meet AI requirements
• Work with product, analytics, and technical leadership to align data strategy with organizational and project goals
• Communicate findings, risks, and architectural decisions clearly in both written and verbal form, including client-facing documentation
• Contribute to RS21 proposal efforts and technical volume sections as a subject matter contributor

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in data engineering, computer science, or a related field
• 5+ years of hands-on data engineering experience, with demonstrated progression into senior or lead responsibilities
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS data services, including S3, Glue, Redshift, Athena, Kinesis or MSK, Lambda, and Lake Formation
• Proven ability to design and deliver production-grade ETL/ELT pipelines and data warehousing solutions
• Solid understanding of streaming architectures and real-time data pipeline design
• Experience supporting AI or LLM-adjacent data workflows, including embedding pipelines and vector store integration
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including direct client interaction
• Experience decomposing and tracking delivery work in Jira or equivalent tooling
• Strong problem-solving skills and architectural reasoning at the workstream level
• AWS certifications: Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03), Data Engineer Associate (DEA-C01), or equivalent
• Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate and/or dbt Certified Developer
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CDK
• Background in consulting, professional services, or multi-client delivery environments
• Familiarity with data governance frameworks, data cataloging, and lineage tooling
• Experience with Databricks, dbt, and Airflow or Prefect orchestration
• Exposure to vector databases such as Amazon OpenSearch, Pinecone, or pgvector
• Exposure to DoD, federal, or regulated-sector data environments; FedRAMP-compliant architecture experience a plus