Senior Translational Data & AI Engineer at Actalent
Wilmington, DE
$74–$78/hrfrom the description
Jul 27, 2026
Wilmington, DE
Jul 28, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A contract Senior Data & AI Engineer role focused on building and modernizing cloud-based data platforms for clinical and biological research. The engineer will design and operate ingestion and transformation pipelines for multi-modal scientific data (genomics, proteomics, clinical), implement clinical data standards (SDTM/ADaM), and integrate AI coding agents into engineering workflows. The position suits an experienced data engineer comfortable with AWS, Python, SQL, and scientific/bioinformatics data domains.
Senior level · 4+ years · Remote · Bachelor's required · 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 1,400 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 420–2,100
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $142,568 (middle half $111,775–$173,013). 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 (9)
The role is posted by Actalent, a staffing firm; the actual work is at a life-sciences/pharma client based in Wilmington, DE.
The 4+ years experience requirement is explicitly tied to data engineering on AWS production pipelines, so it is captured as both the role-level minimum and as the years demanded on the AWS skill.
The posting requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree in a relevant field with no 'or equivalent experience' escape clause, so the degree requirement is set to Bachelors (the lower of the two stated options).
AI coding agent experience (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent) is explicitly called out as essential and critical to success, so it is marked required with the named alternatives captured.
ECS and Fargate are listed as interchangeable options ('ECS or Fargate') in the requirements section, so they are combined into one skill with Fargate as the alternative.
R and PySpark appear in both the essential skills and additional qualifications sections as legacy codebase languages to refactor from; they are treated as interchangeable context (one or the other) and marked preferred since the framing is about familiarity with legacy code rather than active use.
dbt and Docker are not explicitly named in the posting but are strongly implied by 'modern data engineering libraries/frameworks' and 'containerized deployments' respectively; they are omitted since the posting names no specific tool for these — only the named technologies are captured.
The SOC classification is a close call between 15-1243 (Database Architects, for the data platform/pipeline/modeling focus) and 15-1252 (Software Developers, for the broader software engineering and AI-native development scope); 15-1243 is chosen as primary given the dominant emphasis on data architecture, lakehouse design, and transformation modeling.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Read the full posting
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