Working at ICF means applying a passion for meaningful work with intellectual rigor to help solve the leading issues of our day. Smart, compassionate, innovative, committed, ICF employees tackle unprecedented challenges to benefit people, businesses, and governments around the globe. We believe in collaboration, mutual respect, open communication, and opportunity for growth.

We can only solve the world's toughest challenges by building an inclusive workplace that allows everyone to thrive. We are an equal opportunity employer, committed to hiring regardless of any protected characteristic, such as race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status, or military/veteran status. Together, our employees are empowered to share their expertise and collaborate with others to achieve personal and professional goals. For more information, please read our EEO & AA policy.

ICF is seeking a Data Architect to drive cloud migration and optimization of sophisticated IT systems in the healthcare and life sciences domains to support the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The ideal candidate will design and build modern, innovative reporting and analytics solutions in the healthcare and life sciences domains. Our teams are migrating solutions to the cloud that collect healthcare data from hundreds of thousands of daily users, which informs decisions on healthcare policy. You will bring your expertise in software development to lead and guide our team in an Agile environment that has a major impact on child health and development research in our country. 

Responsibilities

• Determine database structural requirements by analyzing client operations and systems. 
• Create conceptual, logical, and physical database designs using data modeling approaches such as UML, E-R, XML Schema, JSON Schema, and SQL. 
• Select appropriate database architecture and technologies - OLTP vs OLAP, relational vs NoSQL, document vs columnar, graph vs triple-store, etc. 
• Implement and optimize physical database design to support performance, scaling, security, backup, and disaster recovery requirements. 
• Work closely with application developers and data analysts to design and optimize data access, query, reporting, and analysis strategies. 
• Provide guidance to the DevOps team for maintaining database performance by identifying and resolving production and application development problems, calculating optimum values for database parameters, evaluating, integrating, and installing new releases, performing maintenance, and answering user questions

Minimum Qualification

• Bachelor's degree  
• 8+ years of professional IT experience to include 4+ years in a data architect role with experience with NoSQL products, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and DynamoDB, Elasticsearch. 
• 5+years experience with AWSRDBMS services, such as PostgreSQLRDS and Redshift. 
• 5+ years experience with advanced SQL features - regular expressions, analytical functions (e.g. RANK, PARTITION, LEAD, LAG, etc.). 
• 3+ years experience  using a query planner and database metrics to analyze and optimize queries, table structure, indices, and partitioning strategies. 
• Candidate must have resided in the United States 3 of the last 5 years.
• Candidate must be able to obtain a Public Trust clearance 
• Candidate must reside in the US, be authorized to work in the US, and work must be performed in the US

Preferred Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science 
• Experience in the healthcare domain or with healthcare quality data sets  
• Familiarity with other query languages - e.g. XPath, MongoDB query language, Elasticsearch query language, JSON Path, SPARQL, etc. 
• Experience with the following technologies is also highly desirable: Tableau, Looker, Hadoop, Spark. 
• Federal Government contracting work experience. 
• Prior experience working remotely full-time.

Professional Skills

• Strong technical communication skills; both written and verbal 
• Strong problem solving and structuring skills. 
• Ability to identify and learn applicable new techniques independently as needed. 
• Flexible and willing to accept a change in priorities as necessary. 

COVID-19 Policy: New or prospective U.S. employees must provide proof of complete vaccination on the date of their commencement of employment. If selected for employment, you will provide proof of your full vaccination status, defined as vaccinated two weeks after receiving the requisite number of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine approved or authorized for emergency use by the FDA.

Reasonable Accommodations are available, including, but not limited to, for disabled veterans, individuals with disabilities, and individuals with sincerely held religious beliefs, in all phases of the application and employment process. To request an accommodation please email icfcareercenter@icf.com and we will be happy to assist. All information you provide will be kept confidential and will be used only to the extent required to provide needed reasonable accommodations. Read more about non-discrimination:  EEO is the law and  Pay Transparency Statement.

Pay Range - There are multiple factors that are considered in determining final salary for a position, including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and competencies that align to the specified role, geographic location, education and certifications as well as contract provisions regarding labor categories that are specific to the position.