Data Engineer/Modeler

Description

We are looking for a Data Engineer/Modeler to join a long-term contract opportunity in West Des Moines, Iowa. This position focuses on shaping enterprise semantic models and ontology frameworks that make business information consistent, governed, and usable across analytics, reporting, AI, and advanced data initiatives. The ideal candidate will combine strong data modeling expertise with hands-on semantic and knowledge graph experience, along with a solid understanding of insurance data domains. Working closely with technical teams and business partners, this role will help create a trusted data foundation that supports enterprise decision-making.

Responsibilities:
Build and enhance enterprise ontologies, semantic structures, taxonomies, and knowledge graph models to represent core business concepts in a machine-readable format.
Define entities, attributes, hierarchies, relationships, business rules, and performance metrics across multiple data domains to support a consistent semantic layer.
Develop models for insurance-focused subject areas such as policy, claims, underwriting, customer, product, sales, and producer or agency data.
Translate logic captured in reports, dashboards, operational workflows, stored procedures, and stakeholder knowledge into governed semantic and data models.
Apply both business-led and source-system-driven modeling approaches to align conceptual designs with underlying data structures.
Assess and improve AI-assisted ontology outputs to ensure semantic accuracy, usability, and alignment with enterprise standards.
Connect ontology concepts to physical source systems and confirm model integrity against trusted systems of record.
Manage model promotion and version control across development, testing, and production environments using Git and established release practices.
Partner with architects, engineers, BI teams, analysts, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable semantic solutions and support governance, lineage, metadata, and data quality efforts.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in data modeling, data architecture, or ontology and semantic modeling roles.
Strong capability in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, including experience with physical data model design.
Hands-on knowledge of ontology development, semantic modeling, and knowledge graph design within enterprise data environments.
Proficiency with SQL and experience supporting ETL and large-scale data processing workflows.
Familiarity with technologies such as Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Apache Kafka, ERwin Data Modeler, and related data engineering tools.
Experience working with cloud-based data platforms; exposure to S3 and Apache Iceberg is an advantage.
Insurance industry experience is required, and annuity domain knowledge is highly preferred.
Strong communication skills with the ability to turn business needs into scalable semantic and data solutions.

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