Data Engineer

Central Strategies is seeking a skilled Data Engineer to play a critical role in designing, building, and maintaining robust data pipelines, ensuring near real-time data flow, and enabling downstream data analytics teams. This is a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge data architecture, streaming technologies, and advanced analytics solutions that drive key business decisions. This role will be remotely working Eastern Standard Time core hours.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain real-time and batch data pipelines integrating a variety of data sources including streaming or event-driven data.
• Develop and optimize ETL/ELT workflows for ingestion, transformation, and delivery of structured and unstructured data.
• Collaborate with data scientists, analysts, and cloud engineers to define schemas, data quality standards, and performance baselines.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and tune data pipelines for performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Maintain detailed documentation of data pipelines, transformations, and dependencies.
• Stay up to date with evolving the Apache data ecosystem and emerging best practices in data engineering.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field (or equivalent hands-on experience).
• 3+ years of professional experience in data engineering.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka (Confluent, MSK, Red Panda, or similar) for event streaming.
• Experience with Databricks for large-scale data ingestion, transformation, and analytics integration.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with solid SQL experience for data modeling and transformations.
• Understanding of data lakehouse architectures, Delta tables, and distributed processing performance tuning.
• Familiarity with AWS services.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Certifications in Databricks and Apache Kafka are a plus.