Description

The DarkStar Group is seeking a Systems Engineer with a TS/SCI Poly clearance (applicable to this customer) to join one of our top projects in McLean, VA. Below is an overview of the project, as well as information on our company, our benefits, and our $25,000 referral program.

THE PROGRAM

The DarkStar Group is a member of 100% of the winning teams for the largest technology program in the Intel Community. We've been supporting this customer on many different sub-projects of this program since our founding in 2013. We've grown on this effort by providing the customer with Engineers who have done exceptional work, and we've retained our staff by paying very strong salaries, and working hard to ensure each Engineer is doing work that aligns with their career interest.
THE PROJECT
The Sponsor’s organization provides technical solutions and capabilities that enable a cadre of analysts to make critical assessments, including a platform to conduct enterprise search, digital forensics, and data analytics. The Sponsor’s organization is building a modern cloud-based system to replace a legacy standalone system and requires an infrastructure team that can work in a quick-paced, dynamic, agile software development environment. The Sponsor adheres to Agile Scrum development methodology best practices and has 2-week sprint cycles. The Contractor team shall work with a variety of individuals, including key stakeholders and other development teams. However, the Sponsor project manager will manage priorities. The team will be responsible for identifying, documenting, and communicating risks and mitigations across the designed system and reviewing the existing and designed system to identify gaps and minimize overlaps, analyze project needs for alternative solutions, and identify needed layers and modules and how they work together for the system. The team will play a key role in the development and selection of backend database technologies and optimization of the database population to support content, volume, ETL, and periodicity of data and will review technical implementation strategies and plans, identifies inconsistencies and opportunities for improvement and communicates those results to the PM.

THE ROLE

The Sponsor requires a team to support their program that automates processing of large forensic images, extract and enrich metadata, and display resulting information in meaningful ways for analysts to conduct their assessments.

Required Skills

• Demonstrated experience working with an AWS cloud environment.
• Demonstrated experience understanding and implementing system security requirements.
• Demonstrated experience creating a testing environment to identify and improve bugs and efficiencies.
• Demonstrated experience programming in Python, PowerShell, and Java 8 .
• Demonstrated experience using Python and the PySpark library to read, write, and manipulate large structured and semi-structured datasets.
• Demonstrated experience using task tracking and version control technology to include JIRA and GitHub.
• Demonstrated experience using SQL and database technologies such as MySQL or SQL server.
• Demonstrated experience using and managing ElasticSearch clusters. 
• Demonstrated experience tuning and optimizing ElasticSearch.
• Demonstrated experience creating and managing ElasticSearch indices. 
• Demonstrated experience with Apache Spark and managing Spark clusters.
• Demonstrated experience tuning and optimizing Apache Spark.
• Demonstrated experience with the Databricks platform and Databricks API & CLI.
• Demonstrated experience understanding Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
• Demonstrated experience understanding Databricks File System (DBFS).
• Demonstrated experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) technologies including AWS Cloud Formation.
• Demonstrated experience using automated build tools such as Jenkins.
• Demonstrated experience implementing machine learning models on text and multimedia data such as Spark NLP and Computer Vision models.
• Demonstrated experience with Linux operating systems and shell scripting such as Bash.
• Demonstrated experience developing machine learning models on text data and structured datasets.

Desired Skills (Optional)

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Data Science, Statistics, or related field or equivalent work experience.
• Demonstrated professional experience with cloud technology networks, digital forensics, or cybersecurity topics.
• Demonstrated experience using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies/packages.
• Demonstrated experience using data pipelines and workflow technologies.

About The DarkStar Group

Our Company

The DarkStar Group is a small business that solves BIG problems. We're one of the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the US, and our engineers and scientists support the most critical national security missions in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere. Data Science, Software Engineering, Cloud/AWS Infrastructure, and Cyber/CNO are our core areas of expertise. We offer interesting and important work, job security, some of the best and most flexible benefits you'll find in the IC, and salaries so strong that they'll likely surprise you. 

Our Benefits

The DarkStar Group offers exceptional compensation and benefits:

• very strong salaries;
• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision premiums for you and all dependents;
• the ability to get increased salary if you don't need medical/dental/vision;
• 100% company-paid disability and life insurance benefits;
• a generously-funded HSA;
• an 8% 401(k) contribution; 
• 31 days of PTO/holidays to start (more with tenure);
• the ability to flex time across pay periods without using your PTO;
• a generous training budget;
• $25,000 employee referral bonuses;
• business development / growth incentives; and
• top notch company swag.

** We have a huge growth opportunity, so we are offering up to a $25,000 reward for anyone new you refer whom we hire. **
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.