Lead Data Engineer at TEKsystems
Duluth, GA
$70–$90/hrfrom the description
Jul 13, 2026
Duluth, GA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A contract-to-hire role centered on designing, building, and maintaining production-grade data pipelines, data models, and governance frameworks within an Azure-based environment (Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Synapse, ADLS). The position also carries a technical leadership dimension — mentoring engineers and setting best practices. It suits an experienced data engineer with strong Python, SQL, and ETL/ELT skills who is comfortable working across both platform engineering and stakeholder-facing analytics delivery.
Senior level · 7+ years · Remote · Contract
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 280 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database administrators). range 80–420
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $106,921 (middle half $81,361–$138,439). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting is contract-to-hire; the $70–$90/hr range is the stated pay band. An earlier mention of '$85 hr/w2' appears to be a recruiter-entered rate that was superseded by the formal pay range.
The title 'Lead Data Engineer' maps to Senior seniority — the role has technical leadership scope (mentoring, design reviews, standards-setting) but no explicit people-management or org-wide authority that would push it to Staff or Principal.
Azure SQL and PostgreSQL are listed as alternatives in the JD ('Azure SQL or PostgreSQL'); emitted as one required skill with PostgreSQL as the alternative.
The Nice to Have section covers: enterprise business system integration, analytics/reporting support, search technologies/APIs/data services, AI-enabled tooling, and cloud-native/modern data architecture patterns. None are emitted as required skills.
SOC 15-1243 (Database Architects) is chosen because the primary day-to-day work is designing and building data pipelines, data models, and data platforms — pipeline/warehouse architecture work. 15-1252 (Software Developers) is a plausible runner-up given the Python development and CI/CD emphasis.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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