Data Engineering Project Manager - War Data Platform

About the role

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) of the Department of War is hiring a Data Engineering Project Manager for its War Data Platform (WDP) in Washington, DC. The role provides senior project and product leadership for the WDP, defining and executing its product vision, strategy and multi-year data roadmap covering data ingestion, cross-domain data movement, pipeline orchestration, data cataloging, API management and migration from legacy systems to a unified modern architecture. It acts as the bridge between mission operators, data scientists, analytics teams and platform engineers, balancing data operations with data governance and security compliance.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as senior project manager for enterprise data engineering on the WDP.
• Develop and maintain the WDP's product vision, strategy and multi-year roadmap, including automated data ingestion, connection onboarding, pipeline orchestration and observability, API delivery, data cataloging and lineage, self-service data movement and migration to modern cloud architectures.
• Manage the capability backlog, approving epics, user stories, technical specifications and acceptance criteria while balancing new development with operational reliability and technical debt reduction.
• Supervise data movement across batch and streaming pipelines, database replication, managed file transfers and connections to authoritative data sources, including flows spanning multiple security classification levels and cloud impact levels.
• Review and approve solution designs for ETL/ELT pipelines, orchestration, storage and data serving, and evaluate architectural patterns such as data warehouse, data lake and mesh designs.
• Establish, monitor and report on SLOs and KPIs, lead root-cause analysis of outages and data quality issues, and enforce monitoring, alerting, data lineage tracking and automated recovery.
• Use hands-on knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure as code and DoW-authorized cloud data services to assess contractor proposals and validate levels of effort.
• Partner with data science, analytics and AI teams so data connections meet mission needs for feature engineering, model training, business intelligence, data freshness, granularity and historical retention.
• Act as liaison between mission owners, cybersecurity, platform operations, enterprise architecture and external data providers, and prepare decision memoranda, executive briefings and status reports for senior leadership.
• Develop and refine engineering standards, processes, templates and implementation guidance.

Required profile

• U.S. citizenship is required.
• Top Secret/SCI security clearance required.
• Must be determined suitable for federal employment and able to complete a three-year trial period if not previously completed.
• Eligibility for the WHS/OSW Priority Placement Program (Military Spouse Preference, Military Reserve and National Guard technicians).
• May require work outside normal hours, including evenings, weekends and holidays, and occasional travel away from the duty station.