Lead Database Engineer
Appian Corporation · McLean, VA
$125,000–$250,000
Jul 26, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 27, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A database engineering role focused on designing and maintaining complex data architectures for U.S. Department of Defense initiatives. Day-to-day work involves migrating legacy databases to modern platforms, converting stored procedures, building ETL pipelines, tuning performance, and integrating database objects into CI/CD workflows. Suited to experienced data engineers with broad RDBMS and NoSQL expertise who hold or can obtain a DoD Secret Clearance.
Senior level · 5+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Bachelor's required · Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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 $166,452 (middle half $130,866–$200,954).
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 role title is 'Database Engineer' but the responsibilities (designing logical/physical data models, architecting data platforms, building ETL pipelines, migrating schemas across engines) align most closely with 15-1243 Database Architects. 15-1242 Database Administrators is the runner-up given the operational tuning, monitoring, and cluster configuration duties.
The Required Qualifications section lists database platforms with 'such as' framing (Microsoft SQL Server, MariaDB, Postgres, Oracle, AWS Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks). These are treated as hard gates on the capability class; the named tools are captured as a primary with alternatives where they are genuinely interchangeable (e.g. SQL Server/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/Oracle as RDBMS options). Snowflake and Databricks are distinct platforms and are listed separately.
The posting explicitly notes 'Degree is strictly required,' so Bachelor's is a hard gate rather than a preference.
Active DoD Secret clearance is listed as required, with 'or ability to obtain' as an alternative path — still treated as a clearance gate.
The preferred qualifications section explicitly labels Python, Java, C#, XML, JSON, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and RHEL8 as 'Familiarity with,' confirming they are preferred rather than required.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
Requires a 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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