Contract Data Platform Engineer Jobs in Raleigh, NC

Kimley-Horn is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to join our Innovations team in Raleigh, North Carolina (NC). This is an in-office opportunity

Kimley-Horn is building an enterprise data platform to activate project and operational data for AI, search, analytics, and knowledge access across our AEC project delivery ecosystem. We're looking for a Data Engineer to help build a Microsoft Fabric-based lakehouse + warehouse platform on OneLake that unifies data, applies strong governance, and delivers trusted data products for enterprise use. This role will partner closely with IT, security, and civil engineering leadership to build a scalable, secure foundation for data activation across the firm.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse + warehouse architecture on OneLake, with Bronze and Silver layers in the Lakehouse and curated Gold data products in the Warehouse.
• Build and maintain ingestion, transformation, and publishing pipelines using Fabric and related Azure services, including Data Factory pipelines, Lakehouse, Warehouse, notebooks/Spark, and SQL.
• Integrate data from key AEC systems-including project delivery, documents, financials, scheduling, and GIS/BIM-related sources-and develop repeatable onboarding patterns using incremental loads, CDC where appropriate, monitoring, alerting, and runbooks.
• Publish trusted data products, metadata, and lineage that support AI use cases such as enterprise search, copilots, and retrieval-based applications.
• Partner with IT and security to establish data quality, governance, access controls, data classification, lifecycle policies, and production DataOps practices.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or building production-grade data platforms and pipelines.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational and analytical data modeling, transformation design, and curated datasets for downstream use.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric strongly preferred; equivalent experience with Azure-based lakehouse, warehouse, or modern data platform services will also be considered.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Spark, plus experience with orchestration tools such as Microsoft Fabric Data Factory pipelines or Azure Data Factory.
• Experience supporting production data workloads, including incremental loading or CDC patterns, monitoring, CI/CD, governance, and collaboration across technical and business teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience implementing medallion architecture patterns in Microsoft Fabric.
• Experience preparing enterprise data for AI or LLM-driven use cases, including metadata enrichment, chunking, embeddings workflows, or retrieval optimization.
• Familiarity with Azure AI Search, vector or hybrid retrieval patterns, and secure enterprise search architectures.
• Familiarity with data catalog, governance, and lineage tools such as Microsoft Purview or similar platforms.
• AEC domain familiarity, including project delivery data, GIS, BIM/CAD metadata, and document workflows.

Why This Role

This is an opportunity to help build the trusted data foundation that makes project information usable across the firm-for analytics, enterprise search, copilots, and AI-powered applications.

At Kimley-Horn, we do things differently. People, clients, and employees are at the forefront of who we are. Clients know we prioritize achieving their goals and growing their success. Employees know our culture and approach to business are built on a desire to provide an environment for everyone to flourish. Our commitment to quality is only as good as the people behind it- that's why we welcome and develop passionate, hardworking, and proactive employees. We take pride in how our employee retention, robust benefits package, and company values have led to Kimley-Horn's placement on the Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work" list for 19 years!

Key Benefits at Kimley-Horn

• Exceptional Retirement Plan: 2-to1- company match on up to 4% of eligible compensation (salary + bonus) and additional profit-sharing contribution.
• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Low-cost medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
• Time Off: Personal leave, flexible scheduling, floating holidays, and half-day Fridays.
• Financial Wellness: Student loan matching in our 401(k), and performance-based bonuses.
• Professional Development: Tuition reimbursement and extensive internal training programs.
• Family-Friendly Benefits: New Parent Leave, family building benefits, and childcare resources.