Senior Data Engineer (Talend / SQL / Data Pipelines)

Senior Data Engineer

Job at a Glance

• Location: hybrid in Richmond VA

• Contract: W2 only, 12 month contract

• Pay: $60/hr

Key Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end data pipelines and ETL/ELT solutions to support analytics, reporting, and AI/ML use cases, ensuring solutions are robust and production-ready through practical implementation

• Apply scalable patterns for batch and incremental processing by developing, testing, and deploying data workflows, focusing on hands-on coding and troubleshooting

• Review and implement data modeling, transformation logic, and performance strategies, using deep technical expertise to optimize and validate solutions

• Evaluate, select, and integrate tooling, frameworks, and platform capabilities by actively prototyping and configuring systems to meet project requirements

• Build up complex, high-volume data pipelines using SQL-centric ETL/ELT patterns

• Design and implement scalable streaming pipelines to process real-time data, ensuring low latency and reliable delivery for analytics and operational use cases

• Lead performance tuning efforts across pipelines, warehouses, and workloads

• Ensure data pipelines are resilient, observable, and production ready

• Implement enterprise-grade error handling, restartability, and monitoring

• Build and maintain scalable, low-latency streaming data pipelines using technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, or Spark Streaming

• Perform on-the-fly data cleaning, validation, and enrichment before data reaches its final destination

• Use strategies such as indexing and partitioning to fine-tune the data warehouse and big data environments to improve query response time and scalability

• Implement standards for data quality checks, validation, and reconciliation

• Ensure pipelines meet security, access control, and governance requirements

• Partner with governance & DataOps teams on metadata, lineage, and auditability

• Apply consistent naming conventions, documentation, and coding standards

• Improve operational monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes

• Proactively identify reliability, performance, and cost optimization opportunities

• Support and guide production troubleshooting and root cause analysis

• Investigate data quality incidents and identify design/coding gaps

• Participate in design and code reviews to enforce quality and best practices

• Partner with infrastructure, application, and architecture teams to generate process designs and complex transformations

• Translate ambiguous requirements into well-designed technical solutions

• Work in complex multi-platform environments on multiple project assignments

Required Skills

• 5–7+ years Data Engineering

• Hands-on builder (not just design/architecture)

• Strong in SQL, ELT pipelines, and performance tuning

• Experience with production-grade pipelines (monitoring, restartability, quality)

• Comfortable jumping into existing systems quickly

• Experience with ETL tools (Talend preferred, Informatica/dbt acceptable)

Required Education

• Bachelors Degree

Preferred Skills

• Experience supporting AI/ML or advanced analytics pipelines

• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Prior experience influencing enterprise data standards or reference architecture

• Experience optimizing cost and performance in cloud data warehouses

• Hands-on experience with Cribl, Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Spark Streaming, or Apache Flink

About CEI:

As a trusted technology partner, CEI delivers solutions that help our customers transform their business and achieve meaningful results. From strategy and custom application development through application management - our technology and digital experience services are tailored to meet each unique need of our customers. Our staffing solutions bring specialized skills to complement our customers' workforce and project requirements.

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