Job Description
Job DescriptionDescription:
On-site in Falls Church, VA
Our client seeks an experienced Data Platform Architect to provide architectural guidance, technical standards, and operational support for secure, scalable data, analytics, and AI/ML solutions. The role will partner across engineering, data science, analytics, platform, and mission teams to guide implementation in Databricks and Palantir Foundry. The architect will help delivery teams structure data pipelines, data products, analytics and ML workflows, and platform assets for consistency, reuse, governance, supportability, and production readiness. The position requires hands-on guidance in data integration, DataOps, DevOps, MLOps, governance, security, compliance, performance optimization, and platform operations to transition prototypes into reliable production environments.
Due to federal security clearance requirements, applicant must be a United States Citizen with an active Top Secret clearance. This is a contract to hire opportunity. Applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis and convert to FTE following contract duration. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance.
Rate: $80.00 to $85.00/hr. w2
Responsibilities:
- Provide hands-on architectural guidance to teams implementing data pipelines, analytics workflows, data products, and AI/ML capabilities in Databricks and Palantir Foundry.
- Guide selection and implementation of platform-native capabilities for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, model execution, analytics, and data-product delivery.
- Advise teams on appropriate use of Databricks, Foundry, and integrated cross-platform architectures.
- Guide the transition of prototypes and notebook-based solutions into reliable, maintainable production workflows.
- Establish and maintain technical standards for project structure, code organization, pipeline design, workflow orchestration, testing, metadata, lineage, documentation, and platform implementation.
- Develop reusable templates, reference architectures, and implementation patterns that improve consistency and accelerate delivery.
- Promote scalable approaches including medallion architecture, governed data publishing, reusable transformation logic, and shared analytics and ML components.
- Conduct technical reviews and provide actionable guidance to improve scalability, maintainability, reliability, and supportability.
- Guide CI/CD implementation for jobs, pipelines, notebooks, packaged code, models, and data products.
- Establish operational practices for deployment, environment promotion, monitoring, alerting, rollback, release management, observability, lineage, and data-quality validation.
- Promote reproducible MLOps practices for model training, validation, packaging, registration, deployment, monitoring, batch inference, and lifecycle management using MLflow, Databricks workflows, and related capabilities.
- Design scalable ML inference approaches supporting production workloads and establish monitoring for model performance, data drift, and system health.
- Support self-service ML capabilities that enable data scientists to efficiently deploy and monitor models.
- Define integration patterns for onboarding data sources, managing schema evolution, and connecting Databricks and Foundry with enterprise systems, applications, data warehouses, streaming platforms, APIs, and BI tools.
- Guide implementation of secure access controls, governed data sharing, metadata management, data catalogs, lineage, traceability, and audit-ready workflows.
- Establish data-quality standards and automated testing approaches for analytical and ML workloads.
- Partner with stakeholders to define data definitions, business logic, governance requirements, and compliant handling of structured and unstructured data.
- Advise teams on Spark optimization, workload design, workflow dependencies, storage and compute utilization, and other platform-performance considerations.
- Identify and help resolve architecture, integration, reliability, and performance issues affecting production jobs, data products, and operational analytics.
- Design data models supporting machine learning, analytics, and business intelligence requirements, including integrations with Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik Sense.
- Build and support integrations with MAVEN Smart Systems/Palantir Foundry environments and other enterprise systems.
- Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, BI analysts, product managers, platform and security teams, and mission stakeholders to align architecture decisions with delivery priorities.
- Participate in design sessions, technical reviews, sprint activities, demonstrations, and cross-team problem solving.
- Maintain technical documentation supporting implementation consistency, reuse, operational handoff, and long-term supportability.
Experience Requirements:
- 5+ years of technical experience, including 3+ years designing or implementing production solutions on Databricks, Palantir Foundry, or similar modern data platforms.
- Strong experience with Python, SQL, PySpark, and Spark SQL for scalable data-processing workflows.
- Experience with Palantir Foundry or comparable enterprise analytics platforms, including pipeline development, governed data delivery, lineage, and operational analytics.
- Experience designing and operationalizing data pipelines, transformation workflows, and data products supporting structured and unstructured data.
- Hands-on knowledge of Databricks platform capabilities such as Delta Lake, Workflows, MLflow, Unity Catalog, or similar platform-native services.
- Familiarity with DataOps, DevOps, and MLOps practices, including CI/CD, version control, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
- Strong understanding of data quality, metadata management, lineage, access control, and governance within secure or regulated environments.
- Experience troubleshooting architecture, integration, performance, and operational issues across distributed data platforms.
- Ability to establish technical standards, guide architecture and implementation decisions, and clearly communicate technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Preferred: Deep Databricks expertise, including medallion architecture, Delta optimization, workload tuning, cluster and job strategy, and production ML enablement.
- Preferred: Experience implementing solutions in Palantir Foundry, including data-pipeline organization, governed data assets, operational workflows, and integrations.
- Preferred: Experience with Git-based CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure and deployment tooling, and cloud-native platform services.
- Preferred: Experience supporting the ML lifecycle, including model packaging, registration, deployment, monitoring, and inference-workflow integration.
- Preferred: Knowledge of enterprise data integration, API-based data exchange, and secure cross-platform interoperability.
- Preferred: Experience with Advana/MAVEN Smart System (Palantir Foundry) or similar DoD enterprise analytics environments.
- Preferred: Prior experience supporting Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, or other Federal mission environments.
Recruitment Transparency Notice Eliassen Group values transparency in our recruitment practices. Please be advised that Eliassen Group utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) tools as part of its initial application screening and hiring process. You may receive email and SMS notifications from the Eliassen Virtual Recruiting Team (noreply@eliassen.com, 781-808-2924) inviting you to complete a brief voice screening as part of your application process. These tools assist our hiring teams in different ways, including but not limited to, assistance in reviewing application materials to help identify candidates whose qualifications most closely match the requirements of the position. All AI-assisted evaluations and responses are reviewed by human recruiters before any hiring decisions are made. The use of AI in our process is intended to support fairness, efficiency, and consistency, and Eliassen Group takes measures to prevent bias or discrimination in connection with its hiring practices. By proceeding, you acknowledge, agree, and consent to Eliassen Group’s use of these tools, including AI tools, as part of the application and hiring process.
Skills, experience, and other compensable factors will be considered when determining pay rate. The pay range provided in this posting reflects a W2 hourly rate; other employment options may be available that may result in pay outside of the provided range.W2 employees of Eliassen Group who are regularly scheduled to work 30 or more hours per week are eligible for the following benefits: medical (choice of 3 plans), dental, vision, pre-tax accounts, other voluntary benefits including life and disability insurance, 401(k) with match, and sick time if required by law in the worked-in state/locality.If anyone reaches out to you about an open position connected with Eliassen Group, please ensure that you are working directly with us by confirming the following:
· When you work with Eliassen Group, all email communication will come from an Eliassen.com address, never Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
· Eliassen Group will never ask you for personal information (home address, bank account, or check routing number) until you have worked with someone clearly associated with Eliassen Group.
If you have any indication of fraudulent activity, please contact fraud@eliassen.com.
About Eliassen Group: Eliassen Group is a strategic consulting firm that helps organizations reach further and achieve more through our technology, business advisory, and life sciences solutions. For nearly 40 years, we have combined exceptional people, deep domain expertise, and intelligent capabilities to expand our clients’ capacity and accelerate meaningful outcomes. We are driven by a purpose to positively impact the lives of our employees, clients, consultants, and the communities we serve. Eliassen is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team from a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and all employment decisions are based on merit, performance, and business needs. Eliassen does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender identity or expression, sexual preference or orientation, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), marital status, creed, religion, physical or mental disability, genetic information, military or veteran status, age, ancestry, national origin, citizenship status, prohibited criminal record inquiries of applicants and employees, or any other category protected by federal, state, or local laws. Don’t miss out on our referral program! If we hire a candidate that you refer us to then you can be eligible for a $1,000 referral check!