Data Engineer (Business Analyst IV)

Join our innovation team as a Data Engineer with the Department of Information Technology! Under the leadership of Chief Director of Innovation, you'll drive county-wide data-informed decision making, boost organizational transparency, and enhance operational efficiency by building robust data pipelines, managing advanced database architectures, ensuring top-tier data quality, governance, and security, and partnering closely with Analytics/AI teams to deliver scalable, reliable data solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Designs, builds, and maintains ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines using orchestration tools (e.g., Apache Airflow, Azure Data Factory) and big data frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hadoop) to transport raw data from multiple sources into centralized repositories like data warehouses and data lakes.
• Manages database and data architecture by designing, implementing, and optimizing storage solutions (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, AWS S3, Google BigQuery), including schemas, partitioning, indexing, and data modeling to balance performance, scalability, and cost for transactional and analytical workloads.
• Ensures data quality, governance, and security through validation rules, anomaly monitoring, metadata/lineage management, compliance frameworks (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA), encryption, access controls, and auditing in partnership with security teams.
• Collaborates with business analysts, data scientists, and developers to provide optimized datasets, improve query performance, integrate APIs, and support data projects for decision-making and innovation.
• Builds and manages Snowflake data environments, including initial environment setup, warehouse configuration, role-based access controls, data ingestion pipelines, and performance optimization to support scalable, secure, and cost-efficient analytics.
• Performs other duties as required to support business intelligence and data efforts.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
Any combination of education, experience, and training equivalent to the following:(Click on the aforementioned link to learn how Fairfax County interprets equivalencies for "Any combination, experience, and training equivalent to")

Bachelor's degree in computer information systems, business administration, or related field; plus five years of experience in information systems and process redesign, managing and implementing all phases of the systems development life cycle, including at least one year of supervisory experience.

NECESSARY SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS:
The appointee to this position will be required to complete a criminal background check to the satisfaction of the employer.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience designing/maintaining ETL pipelines utilizing tools such as Apache Airflow or Azure Data factory.
• Strong experience with  big data frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hadoop), and cloud storage (e.g., AWS S3, Google BigQuery).
• Experience integrating external data sources via APIs or streaming frameworks into centralized repositories.
• Experience building or optimizing data lakes or data warehouses, including scheme design and partitioning strategies.
• Experience implementing data validation rules and anomaly detection to ensure data quality in production pipelines.
• Experience managing metadata and data lineage to support governance.
• Expertise in relational/NoSQL databases, data modeling, governance, and security best practices.
• Proven collaboration skills with analytics/AI teams, including query optimization and dataset preparation.
• Excellent technical communication, problem-solving, and organizational skills.
• Experience in working in the  public sector 
• Experience working in large-scale data environments.

Fairfax County is home to a highly diverse population, with a significant number of residents speaking languages other than English at home (including Spanish, Asian/Pacific Islander, Indo-European, and many others.) We encourage candidates who are bilingual in English and another language to apply for this opportunity.