Job Description & Details
This role at the New Jersey Department of Children and Families puts you at the intersection of public service and enterprise cloud data architecture. You aren't just building dashboards; you are leading a multidisciplinary technical team to overhaul how vulnerable populations are served through data-driven decisions. If you want your data pipelines and cloud infrastructure to directly impact child welfare and social programs, this is a rare opportunity to do high-impact public sector work.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You will spend your days balancing high-level strategy with getting your hands dirty in the trenches. One minute you are mapping out an enterprise data catalog and advising leadership on federal statutory compliance, and the next you are knee-deep in an Azure or AWS cloud data lake, reviewing pipeline code or troubleshooting an orchestration failure. You will manage a team of engineers and data modelers while actively bridging the gap between bureaucratic program requirements and modern, scalable cloud data products.
The Core Tech Stack
You need deep, battle-tested fluency in modern cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, paired with rock-solid SQL and Python capabilities. Because you'll be driving a cloud migration and modernization strategy, hands-on familiarity with tooling like Databricks, Spark, dbt, Terraform, and containerization frameworks like Docker and Kubernetes is critical. The organization relies on these components to maintain robust data governance, lineage, and reliable pipelines in a heavily regulated environment.
Interview Expectations
The hiring committee will likely ask you to explain a time you had to implement data governance policies across a legacy organization without killing engineering velocity. They want to see how you balance strict regulatory compliance and data privacy with pragmatic, business-first delivery. Another favorite line of questioning will test your technical depth: expect a scenario where a critical data pipeline fails due to downstream schema changes, and they will want to hear your exact playbook for debugging, root-cause analysis, and restoring observability.
Application Advice
To get past the strict state HR screening, your resume needs to explicitly mirror the minimum and preferred qualifications outlined in the posting. Do not leave room for interpretation—quantify your 10+ years of data engineering experience and explicitly highlight your 5+ years of direct technical management. Make sure keywords like Azure, AWS, data governance, CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, and Python are prominently featured in your experience bullet points, as eligibility is determined strictly on the text provided in your resume.