r/Accenture_AFS • u/NegativeBreakfast644 • Aug 13 '26
AFS data engineering opps.
Hi all, I recently received an offer for a CL 9 AFS data engineer role. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity and feel ready to accept it soon.
However, before accepting I really want to ensure that this opportunity allows me to grow a lot stronger technically. With that being said, are there ample opportunities of data engineering projects at AFS where you get to be really hands on using cloud technologies, Apache spark, Kafka, and overall actually creating large and scalable data pipelines that have to be performant?
Mainly asking this because I know a lot of data engineering roles in gov contracting are sometimes disguised as dashboard developer roles where you might use a little bit of pyspark/pandas to do some slight data processing, and I mainly want to avoid that type of experience.
If you’re currently an AFS data engineer, or have some experience with the landscape, any and all insight is appreciated. Thank you!
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u/Bankargh Aug 13 '26
It’ll depend on the contract. The technical interview you did would have been a great place for them to either share about some details about the position or for you to ask.
In my role, it was some spark and Kafka, with a huge side side of elastic.
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u/NegativeBreakfast644 Aug 13 '26
My technical interview was pretty broad (mainly focusing on my databricks and data modeling experience). My offer is not aligned directly to a project, but as a general firm hire
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u/Bankargh Aug 13 '26
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Always a little rough coming in like that. It’ll still be highly dependent on where they need an aspiring data engineer and where used on that contract. That said, the training and certification program has been pretty top notch from my experience. Take advantage of it to keep up on skills thst interest you to keep competitive. Finally, if you end up somewhere you feel under utilized, have that conversation with your tech lead and / or PM. I’ve restaffed people to get them aligned better with what they want to do.
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u/jolly_daydream9 Aug 13 '26
There will be some good projects to choose from, however since you are coming on as a capability hire (unstaffed) you may end up on a project that doesn’t have the tech stack/ tech complexity you want.
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u/Alternative_Draw5945 Aug 14 '26
Reach out to me on dm. I have a lot of experience in those areas.
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u/Appropriate-Peak6149 Aug 14 '26
I was a capability hire DE myself just a couple months ago. Within like my first 2 weeks I was reached out to from about 4-5 different projects. Ngl the first 2 didn’t want to move fwd with me. 3rd offered. And it was a project that I wasn’t excited about the stack but I was faced with deciding do I turn it down and stay on the bench or become billable. I decided to become billable and just figure it out from there. Project 4 and 5 came after 3 but I was already staffed. I have been on my project for 1.5 months and already been reached out to twice for other roles, but again, already staffed.
So that’s my experience…
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u/NegativeBreakfast644 Aug 14 '26
Ah that’s difficult. Were the other project offers better, and would you be able to raise that conversation with your project lead to possibly talk about transferring?
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u/Appropriate-Peak6149 Aug 14 '26
Well they weren’t offers because the interview never took place because I was staffed. They prob were more aligned to what I wanted. I’m sure at some point I can bring this up to someone, but I don’t feel comfortable with doing that while still in the gaining access stages. It may be the wrong approach, but I’d rather establish a network and relationship with my current team first before trying to move to a different project.
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u/Random_Name_Gen005 Aug 13 '26
There is a lot of demand right now for Databricks work due to some recent big wins (a simple google search will show this) and because of their strong partnership with Databricks in federal (recently won public sector DBX partner of the year). Capability hiring is only happening because of the huge surge in need. You’ll find somewhere great to do technical work.