Senior Data Engineer

American Public Education, Inc. (APEI) is dedicated to providing higher education and training to military service members, veterans, and motivated professionals. The Senior Data Engineer will design and develop scalable data solutions, lead complex engineering work, and ensure data solutions are accurate, secure, and maintainable.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, test, deploy, and support scalable data pipelines, transformations, and reusable data models
• Translate business and technical requirements into maintainable data structures and engineering solutions
• Develop dimensional, relational, and analytical data models that support reporting, analytics, and downstream applications
• Implement controls for data quality, reconciliation, lineage, testing, documentation, and production readiness
• Optimize SQL, data models, workloads, and processing patterns for performance, reliability, scalability, and cost
• Lead technical design reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and resolution of complex production issues
• Partner with data integration, architecture, DevOps, security, governance, analytics, and application teams to deliver end-to-end data solutions
• Establish and promote engineering standards for development, testing, deployment, documentation, monitoring, and source control
• Evaluate source and downstream changes, identify technical risks, and communicate impacts to stakeholders and delivery teams
• Mentor engineers, provide technical guidance, and contribute to the modernization and retirement of legacy data solutions

Requirements:

• Seven or more years of experience in data engineering, data warehousing, ETL/ELT development, database engineering, or a related field
• Advanced SQL skills and demonstrated experience designing and supporting production data pipelines and analytical data models
• Experience with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks, or comparable technologies
• Experience with transformation and engineering tools such as dbt, Coalesce, Spark, SQL-based frameworks, or comparable platforms
• Strong knowledge of dimensional modeling, data warehousing, incremental processing, orchestration, dependency management, and data quality testing
• Experience with a programming or scripting language such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, Java, or Scala
• Experience with Git-based source control, automated testing, CI/CD, deployment management, and production monitoring
• Demonstrated ability to optimize data workloads, investigate complex issues, and design reliable recovery and reprocessing processes
• Working knowledge of data security, access controls, sensitive data handling, lineage, governance, and regulatory requirements
• Strong technical leadership, analytical, documentation, communication, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, data engineering, software engineering, information technology, or a related field. An equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience may be considered
• Cloud-platform, database, data-engineering, or DevOps certifications are preferred but not required