Data Engineer (Hybrid/Remote)

Johnson Lambert is a leading provider of audit, tax, and advisory services with a specialized focus on the insurance, nonprofit, and employee benefit plan sectors. For 35+ years, we’ve built a reputation for deep industry knowledge, exceptional client service, and a culture grounded in agility, respect, and trust. We’re passionate about serving our clients, growing our firm, and developing our people.

About the Team & Role

You’ll join our Business Automation team—a group dedicated to delivering business outcomes through datacentric solutions—as our first datafocused hire. You’ll collaborate daily with highly skilled colleagues (process automation, analytics, and domain experts) who don’t yet have formal data engineering experience. As a handson architectbuilder, you’ll set direction, establish standards, and deliver value from day one. Our firm continues to grow and our clients' data becomes more complex, we are making a strategic investment in a modern data foundation to unlock new efficiencies, enhance our service delivery, and lay the groundwork for a future where data quality, context and availability are paramount.

Our mandate: design and implement our nextgeneration data foundation on AWS, applying modern data lake/lakehouse patterns and open approaches to data layout, governance, and reliability—while staying flexible to evaluate the best tools over time. Note: Our current needs are batchfirst; we are not building near realtime pipelines today.

What You’ll Do

• Own the modern data foundation on AWS: Design secure, scalable, and costaware lake/lakehouse patterns using open, interoperable formats and layered architecture (raw → standardized → curated/analyticsready).
• Build dependable batch pipelines: Implement ingestion, transformation, validation, and orchestration to move data from source systems to governed, analyticsready datasets with clear SLAs/SLOs.
• Translate messy files into trusted data: Create robust, repeatable processes to extract and normalize data from Excel (multisheet, merged cells, header variations, hidden rows, crosstab layouts) and PDF documents (including OCR and table extraction), mapping to standardized schemas.
• Integrate key SaaS sources: Ingest data via APIs/exports from business apps—Salesforce, Slack, Tableau (and similar)—and keep them in sync on reliable schedules.
• Structure data for AI/ML accessibility: Prepare datasets for analytics, ML, and LLM workloads—e.g., semantic/feature layers, curated text corpora, and vector indexes/databases for LLM retrieval (RAG), with appropriate metadata and access controls.
• Model for the business: Implement pragmatic dimensional/lakehouse models aligned to how our audit, tax, and advisory teams work—especially across insurance, nonprofit, and employee benefit plan domains.
• Raise data quality & trust: Embed tests and contracts, schema checks, and observability; maintain lineage, documentation, and data dictionaries that nonengineers can use.
• Harden security & governance: Apply AWS identity, access controls, encryption, classification/tagging, and rightsized governance appropriate for clientserving environments—explicitly protecting client data used in AI/ML contexts.
• Automate and templatize: Use infrastructureascode and CI/CD to make environments reproducible; publish templates/patterns that teammates can reuse without deep data engineering expertise.
• Enable and mentor: Partner with analysts/automation engineers; run reviews, workshops, and coaching to uplevel the team and make data selfservice where practical.
  
   

Required Qualifications

• 5–7 years in progressively complex data engineering/data architecture roles.
• Strong experience building on AWS (storage, compute/serverless, identity, orchestration, monitoring) and operating secure, production data workloads.
• Proven success designing and implementing modern lake/lakehouse architectures using open, interoperable approaches (transactional tables, partitioning, governance, performance optimization).
• Expert data wrangling in Python and SQL for structured and semistructured data (CSV, JSON, Excel) and practical experience with PDF extraction (OCR, layout detection, table parsing).
• Hands-on experience building and deploying data infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, AWS CDK), CI/CD practices, and modern data testing/observability tooling.
• Practical experience implementing data governance solutions for cataloging, lineage, and documentation suitable for sensitive, client-service environments.
• Experience with ETL/ELT tools (e.g., Airflow, Spark) and data platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake; we prioritize open approaches and thoughtful tool selection.
• Ability to ingest from SaaS apps (e.g., Salesforce, Slack, Tableau) via APIs/exports and normalize these feeds into curated datasets.
• Comfortable as a playercoach and firstofitskind hire: setting standards, making buildvsbuy decisions, and delivering under ambiguity.
• Excellent communication skills to translate business requirements into clear technical plans, and vice versa.
• Bachelor’s in Computer Science or related field preferred.
• AWS certifications a plus.
  
   

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with insurance/nonprofit/EBP data (e.g., policy, claims, loss registers; donor/grant; plan/participant).
• Big data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Kafka)—even though our current workloads are batch and not near realtime.
• Experience with LLMassisted extraction or classification for document normalization (with governance/guardrails).
  
   

How You’ll Succeed (Outcomes & Measures)

• First 90 days
• • Stand up or harden a secure AWS baseline and initial lake/lakehouse layout with CI/CD.
  • Deliver a production batch pipeline converting one highvalue Excel/PDF process into a standardized, validated dataset with documentation and lineage.
• By 6 months
• • Operationalize 2–3 priority SaaS integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Slack, Tableau) feeding curated layers on a dependable schedule.
  • Reduce manual prep for target stakeholders by 30–50% through standardized schemas and selfservice access.
• By 12 months
• • Publish reusable ingestion and documentprocessing templates; establish data quality SLAs/SLOs adopted by multiple teams.
  • Demonstrate measurable improvements in reliability, freshness, and adoption across analytics use cases.
    
     

How We Work

Our culture prizes agility, respect, and trust. We iterate in short cycles, document what we build, and keep stakeholders close. We choose modern, open, and maintainable solutions and believe governance should enable—not hinder—delivery. 

Equity note: Research suggests that women and Black, Indigenous, and other persons of color are less likely than men or White job seekers to apply for positions unless they are confident they meet 100% of the qualifications. We strongly encourage interested individuals to apply, and allow us to evaluate the knowledge, skills, and abilities you demonstrate, using an internal equity lens.

Johnson Lambert prides itself for the hands-on approach and relationships we build with future employees, employees, and clients. We believe each application is the potential for a future relationship with JL. Therefore, a member of our HR team personally reviews all applications submitted