Staff Data Engineer
Awetomaton · Beavercreek, OH
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Jul 1, 2026
Beavercreek, OH
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Staff Data Engineer role focused on building and maintaining data ingestion, curation, and metadata-enrichment pipelines that feed enterprise data catalog and discovery services for a defense customer. Day-to-day work involves designing scalable cloud-based data systems — including data lakes, warehouses, and ETL/ELT workflows — that turn raw source data into well-structured, discoverable datasets. Suits an experienced data engineer comfortable with Python, SQL, Spark, and orchestration tools who holds or can obtain a DoD Top Secret clearance.
Senior level · 5+ years · Dayton, OH · Bachelor's required · Top Secret clearance · Full-time
Advertised as Staff, but the requirements read as Senior.
“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
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $131,939 (middle half $104,785–$153,871).
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 title says 'Staff' but the requirements — 5+ years of experience, individual-contributor pipeline/data engineering work — are consistent with a Senior-level role. No evidence of cross-team technical direction or org-wide scope that would genuinely place this at Staff.
The role is nationwide-remote eligible ('can be performed nationwide') but the company strongly prefers candidates local to Dayton, OH or St. Louis, MO; remote is set to false to reflect that strong on-site preference.
DoD Top Secret clearance is required; the posting notes sponsorship is available for highly qualified candidates, but the clearance itself is a hard gate.
Python, SQL, and Spark are listed together as 'Proficiency in Python, SQL, Spark, or similar data-centric technologies' — they are treated as a required capability cluster with SQL and Spark as named alternatives/companions to Python, since all three appear explicitly.
Orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Argo Workflows) are listed under required experience; Airflow is the primary with the others as named alternatives.
Cloud and platform certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, AWS Certified Data Analytics, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) appear only under 'Desired Education and Experience' and are preferred, not required. AWS and Kubernetes are surfaced as preferred skills from this context.
A Master's degree is listed under 'Desired Education and Experience' — only a Bachelor of Science is a hard requirement.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
Requires a Top Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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