Contemporaries Inc. is supporting the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the recruitment of a Data Engineer to support environmental health and extreme weather research initiatives. This long-term contract opportunity offers remote work flexibility and will focus on developing and optimizing data infrastructure that supports scientific modeling, geospatial analytics, and computational research workflows.
Position Responsibilities:
- Design and implement optimized database structures to support scientific modeling workflows.
- Develop and maintain data schemas that ensure efficient querying and storage for large-scale scientific datasets.
- Develop and enhance PTB, CHORDS, and HEW geospatial database management capabilities.
- Work with geospatial datasets and data formats such as NetCDF, GeoTIFF, HDF5, and other environmental data standards.
- Build, document, and maintain end-to-end model pipelines using reproducibility and version control standards.
- Develop workflows utilizing R-based Targets and Python-based Snakemake frameworks.
- Implement automated testing frameworks and validation protocols to ensure pipeline reliability and consistency.
- Develop and test protocols for GPU-accelerated execution of R- and Python-based models.
- Create documentation and best practices related to GPU resource allocation and performance monitoring.
- Design, develop, and deploy Shiny applications for real-time data exploration and model output visualization.
- Ensure visualization applications are user-friendly, performant, and integrated with existing data infrastructure.
- Optimize R-based models through parallelization, vectorization, and algorithmic improvements.
- Configure and optimize workflows within high-performance computing environments, including job scheduling and resource management.
- Port performance-critical components to compiled languages such as C++ or Rust when appropriate.
- Collaborate with scientific teams to provide technical guidance and support environmental health research initiatives.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science, Bioinformatics, Statistics, Environmental Science, or a related field.
- Minimum of three (3) years of professional experience in data engineering, software engineering, computational research support, or a related field.
- Strong experience using the R programming language.
- Experience designing and maintaining database structures supporting large-scale datasets.
- Experience developing reproducible data pipelines and workflows.
- Experience with shell scripting, including Bash.
- Experience working in Linux-based computing environments.
- Experience with batch job scripting and scheduling tools such as SLURM.
- Experience developing interactive applications using Shiny.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and technical communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working with geospatial or environmental datasets.
- Familiarity with geospatial data formats such as NetCDF, GeoTIFF, and HDF5.
- Experience using Python for workflow development or automation.
- Experience utilizing Snakemake, Targets, or similar pipeline orchestration frameworks.
- Experience supporting high-performance computing environments and GPU-enabled workflows.
- Experience optimizing code through parallelization, vectorization, or compiled languages such as C++ or Rust.
- Experience supporting environmental health, climate, or extreme weather research initiatives.
- Experience supporting NIH, HHS, or other federally funded scientific research programs.
- Experience contributing to technical documentation, scientific publications, or collaborative research efforts.
Company Description
Contemporaries is a government contracting firm who has been providing HR and Staff support to both federal and private organizations for over 35 years. Specializing in Administrative and related opportunities, while also working with Scientific, IT, Legal, Research, and related opportunities.