Senior Data Engineer, Architect (NCS) - Mayors Office of Performance and Innovation

THIS IS A NON-CIVIL SERVICE POSITION

Salary Range:

$86,975.00 – $149,519.00 Annually

Starting Pay:

$86,975.00 Annually

Get to Know Us

Welcome to the City of Baltimore! Experience the reward of a fulfilling career and enjoy the added element of excitement in a vibrant, diverse atmosphere. The City of Baltimore offers limitless opportunities to help drive social impact, both on the job and in the community, while serving its citizens. Join us in making Baltimore a great place to live and work. In the City of Baltimore, we hire great people and provide them with the skills and opportunities to grow toward their career aspirations. If you are looking for a career change or interested in learning more, explore our opportunities and benefits programs. We are excited to have you as a part of the City of Baltimore Team! The city offers medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, optional life, AD&D, and FSA plans. This office also supplies wellness programs, support groups, and workshops. You can learn about our benefits here: https://humanresources.baltimorecity.gov/hr-divisions/benefits  

NOTE: GRANT POSITIONS ARE NOT ELIGIBLE FOR RETIREMENT BENEFITS 

Job Summary: 

The Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) is Baltimore’s in-house strategy, performance, and data team. We work across city agencies to strengthen service delivery, build modern data and digital capabilities, and promote transparency. OPI uses data and design to help improve services in ways that residents and staff can see and feel.

The Mayor's Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) is seeking a mission-driven Senior Data Engineer and Architect to help design and develop Baltimore's next-generation data infrastructure. As a core contributor on the team, you’ll co-develop a centralized, enterprise-wide data warehouse and the secure, reliable, and scalable data pipelines that feed it. 

Beyond contributing directly to our codebases, the successful candidate will influence data architecture, orchestration, tooling, and governance. This is a high-impact role for a technically skilled engineer who wants to use their talent for public good. This is an engineering role, but the successful candidate will work on an interdisciplinary team of analysts, designers, and managers to ensure products are adopted by agency staff, policymakers, and the public.  

Essential Functions:

As an architect you will develop data models, data Lakehouse-style tiered layers, orchestration frameworks that make sense for both efficient computation, fellow engineers, and data consumers.

As an engineer, you will develop, and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines using Python, PostgreSQL, and modern orchestration frameworks while implementing data quality, monitoring, alerting, and logging mechanisms to ensure pipeline reliability, performance, and transparency. You’ll automate data ingestion from multiple data sources (e.g., APIs, flat files, databases) into centralized data models for reporting and analysis.

As a member of the Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation, you’ll have context about what datasets mean and how they get used across the enterprise. The team works with agency stakeholders, analysts, and data scientists to get them the data and context that they need.

You’ll also broadly supports ad hoc data curation, visualization, and statistical needs in City Hall. While this is an engineering role, the team works to translate business questions into technical solutions and data products that surface insights and guide action.

Minimum Qualifications:     

Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field from an accredited college or university.

AND 

Experience: Have five plus years of professional experience in data engineering or related technical role.

OR 

Equivalency Notes: Have an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities: 

• Technical Expertise
  • Proficiency in Python for data engineering (Pandas, Polars, SQLAlchemy, Object-relational mapping, requests) 
  • Strong SQL skills and experience working with PostgreSQL or other relational databases with an emphasis on geospatial data.
  • Experience building and maintaining data pipelines (ETL/ELT) using modern tools 
  • Experience with dat