Job Location: Remote, prefer the candidate is in proximity to Springfield, VA and greater DC area for access to APG, MD.
Travel Requirement: Up to 25%
Security Clearance: Active Secret clearance required (interim OK)
Citizenship: US Citizenship required
We are seeking a highly experienced Streaming Data Architect to design and build real time streaming infrastructure for IoT environments using NATS. The ideal candidate has deep experience with modern streaming architectures and hands-on expertise with high volume messaging tools such as Kafka, NATS, or similar distributed systems.
Key Responsibilities:- Architect, design, and implement high performance streaming data platforms using NATS for IoT sensor data ingestion, processing, and distribution.
- Define and maintain message schemas, subject taxonomies, and overall data governance patterns for real-time event-driven systems.
- Develop scalable distributed streaming pipelines capable of handling high-throughput, low-latency, and bursty sensor data.
- Collaborate closely with engineering teams to define data models, communication protocols, and ingestion strategies across diverse IoT devices.
- Evaluate, select, and implement best-in-class frameworks, tooling, and architectural patterns for streaming analytics and durable messaging.
- Optimize streaming architecture for reliability, fault-tolerance, and operations in heterogeneous or constrained environments.
- Integrate streaming components seamlessly with cloud systems, microservices, and downstream analytics or storage platforms.
Requirements
- 8-10 years of experience in data engineering, distributed systems, or related fields with significant focus on real-time or streaming architectures.
- Hands-on experience with enterprise-scale streaming/messaging technologies (Kafka, NATS, Pulsar, or equivalent).
- Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed streaming platforms for IoT or telemetry-driven workloads.
- Strong background in defining message schemas, subject hierarchies/taxonomies, and structured approaches to event data organization.
- Deep understanding of streaming data patterns, event-driven architecture, and high-volume messaging systems.
- Solid grounding in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills- Direct experience building production systems with NATS (JetStream, NATS Server, client libraries, subject design).
- Experience with IoT sensor data, telemetry systems, or device communication protocols.
- Experience with UDP-based communications (e.g., QUIC), especially in latency-sensitive environments.
- Experience in tactical or DDIL (Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, Limited) operational environments.
- Proficiency with Go for back-end or streaming service development.
- Familiarity with edge computing patterns and bridging device-to-cloud data flows.
Soft Skills- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Ability to explain complex distributed system concepts clearly and guide teams on architectural best practices.
- A focus on performance, reliability, and continuous improvement.
Benefits:We offer a competitive benefits package, covering the cost of medical for you and your family; we also offer dental, vision, health and wellness benefits and a generous retirement savings plan. We believe that our employees can manage their workload and their personal life, therefore we extend a generous PTO policy. This allows our employees to balance their lives as they see fit.
Salary Range:The proposed salary range is reflective across all Sherpa 6 locations, years of experience, and skill levels. Salary negotiations will be based on a host of factors including but not limited to your geographic location, prior experience, relevant skills, education, and certifications.
Salary Description
$140,000-$155,000
