Data Engineer

• Location: Herndon, Virginia
• Type: Contract
• Job #4009

Title: Data Engineer
Location: Herndon, Virginia
*Clearance: *Active TS/SCI w/ Polygraph needed to apply *
Company Overview:
Cornerstone Defense is the Employer of Choice within the Intelligence, Defense, and Space communities of the U.S. Government. Realizing early on that our most prized assets are our employees, we continually focus our attention on improving the overall work/life experience they have supporting the mission. Our Team is pushed every day to use their industry leading knowledge to provide end-to-end solutions to combat our nation's toughest and most secure problems. If you are looking for a place to not only be professionally challenged, but encouraged and supported by a company that cares, don't look any further than Cornerstone Defense.

The Data Engineer will lead the data architecture and engineering delivery that enables AI/ML/GenAI solutions, ensuring data is trusted, secure, observable, and scalable from ingestion through consumption. You will design and operationalize modern data and retrieval foundations to support LLM-powered applications including patterns such as RAG, embeddings, vector search, and governed access to structured and unstructured data. You will be partnering with a team working with data science, ML engineering, and product stakeholders to translate use cases into production-ready pipelines and platforms with strong data governance, lineage, quality controls, and monitoring. This role blends hands-on technical ability with delivery management and team development, driving consistent engineering standards and measurable outcomes in client environments.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Data Science, Information Systems or related field.

6 years of consulting experience leading delivery teams, including onshore and offshore team members

6 years of experience gathering non-functional requirements and defining application architecture frameworks, including validation and testing deliverables

5 years of experience working in an AI environment

5 years of experience translating requirements into client ready design documents

5 years of experience in software application architecture analysis, design, and delivery

5 years of experience executing full system development life cycle implementations

Certifications in AI/ML technologies and Cloud platforms, such as AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty, Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer, Azure AI Engineer, Azure Data Scientist, or Azure Solutions Architect

5 years of experience in Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning

5 years of experience in Generative AI/LLMs, preferably experienced in delivering and productionizing

5 years of experience in machine learning model development, natural language processing, and data analysis; Experienced in Supervised and Unsupervised learning, feature engineering, model training, and deployment

5 year of experience in implementing cloud-based AI/ML workloads on any of AWS, Microsoft and Azure.