Full job description

Position Summary

Systems Enginuity, Inc. (SEI) is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, develop, and implement scalable data processing capabilities supporting FAA aviation safety research. This position combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership and focuses on integrating, processing, and delivering high-volume aircraft trajectory, surveillance, operational, environmental, and geospatial information.

The successful candidate will lead implementation of streaming, incremental, and batch data processing pipelines and services that provide reliable data and derived features for predictive analytics, machine learning, visualization, and aviation safety applications. The Lead Data Engineer will work closely with data scientists, aviation researchers, and software engineers while providing technical guidance and mentorship across the engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable real-time/streaming, incremental, and batch data processing pipelines supporting aviation safety research and analytics.
• Design and implement data architectures to integrate and synchronize aircraft trajectory, surveillance, operational, environmental, and other spatial-temporal data.
• Design data models and processing approaches for maintaining aircraft state, trajectory histories, spatial relationships, and derived analytical features.
• Develop and oversee data processing capabilities that provide reliable, reproducible inputs to trajectory prediction, anomaly detection, machine learning, visualization, and other analytical applications.
• Lead development of APIs, data services, feature pipelines, and interfaces connecting source data, analytical models, enterprise platforms, and user-facing applications.
• Address performance, scalability, data quality, temporal alignment, spatial processing, data gaps, and other engineering challenges for high-volume trajectory and telemetry data.
• Work closely with data scientists and ML engineers to support training data generation, model evaluation, feature engineering, and near real-time model execution.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, engineering best practices, and mentoring senior and associate engineers.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field.
• Professional experience in software or data engineering including leadership of complex technical development efforts and engineering teams:
• 8+ years with Bachelor’s degree, or
• 6+ years with Master’s degree.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and SQL and current software engineering practices.
• Significant experience with streaming, event-driven, incremental, or distributed data processing architectures.
• Experience with technologies such as Palantir Foundry, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, or comparable technologies.
• Experience processing large-scale, time-series, telemetry, sensor, geospatial, or spatial temporal data.
• Experience working with APIs, databases, cloud platforms, containerized environments, and modern software/data architectures.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Java, TypeScript, or other programming languages used in large scale distributed systems
• Experience working with geospatial libraries and spatial indexing approaches
• Experience working with aircraft surveillance track data or ADS-B data, trajectory processing, and predictive analytics
• Aviation, aerospace, transportation, or other safety-critical systems experience

Our Interview Process

At SEI, we believe the interview process should be personal and authentic. We do not use AI to conduct interviews. Selected candidates will meet directly with our Project Engineers and Hiring Managers in a live online interview so that we can assess your qualifications, experience, and potential fit within our data science team and culture.

To ensure a fair and equitable evaluation process, we ask candidates not to use AI tools or other assistance during interviews. We want to evaluate each candidate based on their own knowledge, skills, experience, and problem-solving abilities.

Candidates who receive and accept an offer of employment with SEI must successfully complete a U.S. Federal Government public trust security process, which includes fingerprinting, a government conducted background investigation, and other screening.

Eligibility Requirements

Candidates who receive and accept an offer of employment with SEI must successfully complete a U.S. Federal Government public trust security process, which includes fingerprinting, a government conducted background investigation, and other required screenings.

Due to the requirements of the FAA contract supporting this position, applicants MUST BE a U.S. citizen or lawful PERMANENT resident and eligible to satisfy applicable U.S. Federal Government suitability and security requirements. SEI is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship for this position. Individuals working under or requiring temporary employment authorization, including F 1 CPT, OPT, or STEM OPT, are not eligible.

Pay: $104,000.00 - $130,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
•