Mission Data Engineer (TS/SCI with Polygraph required)

A little about us:The Red Alpha Data Science practice grew out of Red Alpha's reputation in Software and System Engineering with our Department of Defense clients. As sometimes happens, customers who trust our expertise in adjacent areas asked Red Alpha to assist with some of their burgeoning Data Science problems.
Culturally, it probably suffices to say that we take our work seriously, but not ourselves. Our leaders have spent time in the trenches and have cursed daylight savings time changes and trailing whitespace as many times as you have. We like to say that we spend 80% of our time cleaning the data...and 20% of our time complaining about cleaning the data. Joking aside, our voices matter, and it is easy to see how our decisions affect the Data Science practice and Red Alpha as a whole. We have a clear vision of where we are headed.
Our team takes a pragmatic approach to Data Science & Engineering, defining it loosely as the intersection of technical expertise, business acumen, and soft skills to solve business problems with data. We spend a lot of time trying to understand the problem before we set about building a solution, and we prefer lower tech useful solutions over shiny algorithms and dust on the shelf. Did we mention we’re pragmatic? We have a diverse set of skills across our team, and whether you are a Data Engineer, a traditional Data Scientist (whatever that means…), an Applied Research Mathematician, a Database Engineer, a Full Stack Developer, or something else in that neighborhood, if you have a knack for picking apart data to make sense of it, we would enjoy having a conversation with you.
A day in the life:We're looking to expand our Data Engineering team in Northern Virginia to modernize our customer's data environment to optimize user access to mission-essential and impactful data.
Here's what we're looking for - does it sounds like you?
A senior engineer interested in enabling the widespread use of open source intelligence data for end users and data scientists across the intelligence community.
You'd join the effort to expand our Data Lake offering built on top of AWS S3, DynamoDB, and Kubernetes into a community-wide data hub.
The goal is modernization of the unclassified OSINT data layer with new access patterns and services that enable AI/ML enrichments, ETL pipelines, and data discovery and dissemination.
Front-line building out the next-generation scalable data architecture using your knowledge of the AWS ecosystem.
What you bring to the table:Now on to the fun of formal requirements - we have to apologize in advance for the corporate-speak here, but just hold your breath for a few lines and everything will be okay. We are actively hiring data professionals for roles across a broad range of skill levels and projects. Our goal is to find the best fit for you so please note that if you apply to one of them and we see a fit elsewhere we will let you know. So do not worry about applying initially for every position you might be interested in.
All of our data scientists need the following skills:
Proficiency with a scripting language such as R or Python
Experience with data science techniques and algorithms such as classification, clustering, random forests, deterministic forests (jk), hierarchical modeling, deep learning, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, and others. Note that you do not need to have all of these (we hope you enjoyed our random smattering of techniques…!) but you should be comfortable and capable with several of them and know some others not on this list.
A B.S. Degree in Data Science, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
For entry-level data scientists, 0-3 years of experience on Data Science projects.
For mid-level data scientists, 3-6 years of experience on Data Science projects.
For senior-level data scientists, at least 6 years of experience on Data Science projects with at least 3 years of experience managing teams.
For this particular role, you will also need:
Active TS/SCI with Polygraph clearance
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field with equivalent experience.
4+ years of recent Java and Spring Framework experience, including strong testing
1+ year of recent experience with AWS
1+ year of recent experience with Elasticsearch
A team player and self starter capable of high performance and flexibility in a dynamic working environment.
These are important skills to have, but not necessarily mandatory:
Experience operating Data Lakes or Data Platforms (eg: Databricks) with knowledge on how to optimize storage technology for client access patterns, and how to propagate CRUD operations throughout a distributed stack (including versioning nuances).
Hands on experience with the AWS S3, DynamoDB, EKS, DocumentDB, Lambda, Timestream, CloudWatch, EC2, ECS.