The posting
Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.
Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.
We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Chief Engineer to provide technical leadership and architectural oversight for a large-scale enterprise data lake and data brokerage platform supporting a Department of Defense (DoD) mission.
The Chief Engineer will be responsible for defining the overarching technical architecture, ensuring integration across multiple engineering disciplines, and guiding the development of a secure, scalable, and highly available data ecosystem.
The ideal candidate possesses a broad understanding of Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Data Engineering, and Data Science, with the ability to translate complex mission requirements into cohesive technical solutions.
This is a strategic technical leadership position requiring strong systems-level thinking, architectural decision-making, and the ability to guide specialized engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities
- Enterprise Architecture: Lead the design and evolution of an enterprise-scale data platform supporting data ingestion, storage, processing, discovery, analytics, and distribution.
- Technical Leadership: Provide architectural direction and technical oversight across Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Data Engineering, Data Science, and Software Development teams.
- Systems Integration: Ensure interoperability across distributed systems, cloud environments, data pipelines, APIs, and mission applications.
- Architecture Governance: Establish technical standards, design principles, and engineering best practices to ensure scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
- Solution Development: Evaluate architectural alternatives, identify technical risks and dependencies, and develop solutions aligned with mission objectives.
- Security & Compliance: Collaborate with cybersecurity and compliance stakeholders to incorporate appropriate security controls, data governance, and regulatory requirements into system architecture.
- Technical Roadmapping: Support technical planning, capability prioritization, technology selection, and long-term platform modernization.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Communicate complex technical concepts, architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to engineering teams, program leadership, and government stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, cloud architecture, data engineering, or related technical disciplines, including significant experience leading complex technical initiatives.
- Understands the DoD Zero Trust Reference Architecture, and its application in the context of Iceberg/Trino.
- Understands technical considerations for operating Petabyte scale Iceberg warehouses including data pipelines, and data cataloging.
- Demonstrated experience architecting or overseeing large-scale, distributed enterprise data systems, including experience with end-to-end ownership of vendor data onboarding, ETL, storage, governance, and access layers.
- Hands-on depth with open-source ETL and data lakehouse technologies, including Apache NiFi (ingestion/routing/provenance), Apache Spark (processing/transformation), Apache Iceberg (storage), and Trino (query/access layer).
- Experience with OpenMetadata or comparable tools (such as Datahub, Alation, etc…) for cataloging, lineage, governance, and data quality metrics.
- Experience building usage analytics and Grafana dashboards that help customers measure the value and return on investment of individual vendor data feeds.
- Experience designing automated data quality evaluation processes that evaluate new feeds at onboarding and continuously monitor completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and schema stability.
- Strong understanding of fine-grained access control, including attribute-based and field-level security enforced by user entitlements, classification levels, and regulatory requirements.
- Experience deploying and operating containerized data platforms on Kubernetes across Azure and AWS, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, high availability, and security hardening.
- Proven technical leadership across engineering teams, with the ability to set architectural standards and serve as the primary technical liaison to customer stakeholders.
- Broad technical understanding across the following disciplines with hands on experience with at least two:
- Platform Engineering: Container orchestration, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, and platform reliability.
- Cloud Infrastructure: Cloud-native architectures, networking, compute, storage, identity and access management, and infrastructure as code.
- Data Engineering: Data lakes, ETL/ELT pipelines, batch and streaming architectures, data integration, metadata management, and data governance.
- Data Science: Foundational understanding of machine learning, statistical analysis, AI/ML workflows, and the infrastructure required to support advanced platform and data analytics.
- Ability to develop and evaluate end-to-end technical architectures spanning multiple engineering domains.
- Strong understanding of system scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, security, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical design discussions, evaluate engineering tradeoffs, and guide multidisciplinary engineering teams.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Apache NiFi, Apache Spark, Trino, or comparable technologies.
- Experience designing large-scale data lakes, data fabrics, data mesh architectures, or enterprise data brokerage systems.
- Experience supporting petabyte-scale data environments or high-throughput data processing systems.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on engineering experience in one or more of the following: Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, or Data Science.
- Knowledge of DoD or Federal data governance policies, security requirements, and regulatory frameworks, including NIST, RMF, FedRAMP, and applicable DoD data management policies.
- Familiarity with cross-domain data transfer, data classification, access control, and sensitive data handling requirements.
- Experience supporting DoD, Intelligence Community, or other Federal enterprise technology programs.
- Experience evaluating emerging technologies and incorporating AI/ML capabilities into enterprise data architectures.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate is a technical generalist with deep architectural expertise and hands on experience in two of the areas above who understands how complex engineering disciplines interact to deliver an integrated enterprise capability.
They must possess a T-shaped architectural profile, combining broad cross-domain awareness with deep, practical acumen in at least one technical discipline to credibly guide high-level decisions. While not expected to perform daily hands-on troubleshooting, they must leverage hands-on experience to evaluate engineering tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and lead overall system architecture.
Above all, this individual must be capable of seeing the entire technical ecosystem, understanding its dependencies, and providing the engineering leadership necessary to deliver a secure, reliable, and scalable enterprise data platform.
Data Engineering Senior Manager
$145,900—$248,000 USD
Pay Range
The posted pay range reflects the national salary range for this position and is provided to give candidates a general understanding of the compensation opportunity. The actual salary offered will be determined based on the requirements of the position and a variety of job-related factors, which may include geographic location, applicable Federal Government contract labor categories and wage rates, relevant experience, skills and competencies, education, certifications, and the scope and responsibilities of the role.
Because this position may be performed in multiple locations and may be subject to different contract requirements, the salary ultimately offered may vary based on the applicable location and contract. The posted range is not a guarantee of a specific starting salary or an indication that an offer will be made at any particular point within the range.
Total Rewards
In addition to competitive base pay, Clarity provides a Total Rewards package designed to attract and retain exceptional professionals committed to excellence. Our benefits reflect the value we place on skilled individuals who drive our impact in critical digital missions.
At Clarity, a career means joining a high-performing team advancing vital work in the digital landscape. We encourage you to consider the total value of joining us—competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and resources that support your growth and impact.
Our Total Rewards package includes performance-based bonuses, extensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) plan with company match, substantial paid time off and holidays, flexible work arrangements where possible, and a range of income protection benefits. We are committed to supporting your well-being, professional growth, and ability to contribute to essential digital missions.
We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
