Government F-1 STEM OPT Sponsorship Jobs in Washington DC
Washington DC is one of the few U.S. markets where government-sector F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship is concentrated among major federal contractors, research institutions, and policy-focused organizations like Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, and MITRE. Federal agencies themselves generally cannot sponsor F-1 STEM OPT workers directly, but the contractor ecosystem surrounding them is extensive and actively recruits STEM graduates.
See All Government JobsOverview
Showing 5 of 15+ Government F-1 STEM OPT Sponsorship Jobs in Washington DC
Have you applied for this role?
Have you applied for this role?
Have you applied for this role?
Have you applied for this role?
Have you applied for this role?
See all Government F-1 STEM OPT Sponsorship Jobs in Washington DC
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Government F-1 STEM OPT Sponsorship Jobs in Washington DC.
Get Access To All JobsMinimum Education
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
Minimum Experience
3
Summary
Assists with designing and implementing data management infrastructure. Contributes to building and maintaining data management systems that combine core data sources into data repositories to enable reporting/visualization and analysis of data. Assists with writing or improving code to handle complex data processing tasks. Assists with product development of internal systems, tools, and platform. With regular direction, identifies key opportunities for improvement and technical/process enhancement to increase operational efficiencies. Helps to explore and query datasets, cleans, and transforms data, and may develop dashboards and visualizations. Has an intermediate ability to use tools and technologies that protect the security of Board data.
Duties and Responsibilities
- With regular guidance, influences building and architecting next generation data management platforms on a group of core technologies. Contributes to developing, maintaining, and optimizing data management solutions that ensure high availability of data availability, data scalability, data quality, data integrity and data security. Contributes to exploring new datasets, promoting data discovery and understanding, revising existing data and building and maintaining data views and aggregate data series of low complexity. Helps to query datasets and cleans/transforms data of low complexity.
- Has an intermediate understanding of new/key technologies and platforms and how to incorporate third party APIs and open source/reusable components. Uses intermediate knowledge of new/key technologies to begin to influence the implementation of innovative solutions.
- Contributes to utilizing lean and agile software development practices such as test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, and deployment, version control, and simple design to create quality, reusable code. Assists with writing or improving code to handle complex data processing tasks, or rewriting old processes written in older languages. Contributes to collecting ongoing data updates from external sources to establish and maintain software code used to convert raw data into usable formats.
- With regular guidance, creates and maintains programs and processes necessary to provide data for production and research. Contributes to implementing processes and programs that monitor data quality, logging and responding to production issues, and ensures production data is always accurate and available for key stakeholders/customers and business processes that depend on it.
- Assists with product development of internal systems, tools and platforms supporting operational capabilities. Contributes to transitioning existing products out of legacy technology platforms. May contribute to creating new products as ad hoc requests arise.
- Assists with integrating data from multiple sources to employ simple features of integration technologies. Contributes to developing recommendations and providing guidance related to data integration strategy in order to meet future reporting and analytic needs.
- With regular guidance, influences the designing, constructing, and implementing of a database system to meet strategic needs. Contributes to building data management systems that combine core data sources into data repositories to enable reporting and analysis of data. Builds up skills related to developing and maintaining data pipelines that ingest data from a wide variety of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data formats.
- With regular direction, identifies key opportunities for improvement and technical/process enhancement to increase operational efficiencies, address future technological needs, and reduce costs associated with the use of internal tools.
- Assists with safeguarding digital data throughout its entire lifecycle to protect it from corruption, theft, or unauthorized access. Has an intermediate ability to use tools and technologies that protect data in transit and/or at rest through processes like data masking, encryption, and redaction of sensitive information. Contributes to setting access permissions.
- Utilizes foundational to intermediate knowledge of key components of cloud computing and one or more cloud technology platforms. Assists with evaluating use cases to determine which cloud tools and services best fit a client’s needs.
- Contributes to gathering and analyzing various quantitative and qualitative data to provide useful information and actionable recommendations to clients. Based on data analysis, helps to illustrate and report data findings using intermediate knowledge of visual charts, figures, tables, and dashboards to tailor findings to specific audiences.
- Develops knowledge and awareness of and adheres to applicable governing standards.
- Assists with governing large volumes of both structured and unstructured data. Contributes to designing, developing, automating, and troubleshooting data flows and pipelines to process large quantities of data.
- With regular assistance, proactively troubleshoots, diagnoses, documents and resolves escalated support problems as assigned. Refines abilities in explaining technical problems/solutions to non-technical individuals, in order to provide context for how the issue was resolved.
- Assists with writing documentation for new and existing productions processes and data items. Helps to ensure up-to-date documentation is available and written in a clear and succinct manner.
Position Requirements:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus three years of experience. Must have intermediate knowledge in one or more of the following areas: cloud technology, relational and NoSQL database design/development, data analysis, data security, technology compliance, big data management, data workflow management and automation, data pipeline, data catalog, metadata management, data ingestion, data transformation and data exchange. Must be able to work effectively with more senior staff. Must be able to support more senior staff with technical support, database administration, technical problem solving, technical documentation, data visualization, code creation/maintenance, data integration, and production development/maintenance. Highly desirable skills include:
- 2+ years of experience with R programming for data manipulation, transformation, and analysis
- Experience with data wrangling and reshaping operations (e.g., pivoting, joins, aggregations)
- SQL proficiency for querying databases, creating views, and data extraction
- Experience working with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or similar)
- Familiarity with data validation and quality checks (range validation, completeness testing)
- Experience with version control using Git (e.g., GitLab, Github, or similar)
- Knowledge of data integration patterns (extracting data from APIs, databases, or files)
- Experience with R packages for data manipulation (e.g., dplyr, data.table, tidyr, or similar)
- Familiarity with distributed data processing tools (e.g., pyspark/sparklyr)
FR-25 Minimum Qualifications:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus four years of experience. Highly desirable experience in addition to FR-24 include:
- Basic understanding of cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure, Databricks, or willingness to learn Databricks)
- Experience writing clear documentation and working in collaborative team environments
- Familiarity with R Markdown or similar reporting tools
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines or automated deployment workflows
FR-26 Minimum Qualifications:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus five years of experience. Highly desirable experience in addition to FR-25 include:
- Demonstrated experience in project leadership and management
- Experience with Agile engineering practices including developing user stories and managing customer expectations.
- Experience in data architecture and design
This position requires an in-office presence in Washington, DC
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or application, membership, or service in the uniformed services.
Minimum Education
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
Minimum Experience
3
Summary
Assists with designing and implementing data management infrastructure. Contributes to building and maintaining data management systems that combine core data sources into data repositories to enable reporting/visualization and analysis of data. Assists with writing or improving code to handle complex data processing tasks. Assists with product development of internal systems, tools, and platform. With regular direction, identifies key opportunities for improvement and technical/process enhancement to increase operational efficiencies. Helps to explore and query datasets, cleans, and transforms data, and may develop dashboards and visualizations. Has an intermediate ability to use tools and technologies that protect the security of Board data.
Duties and Responsibilities
- With regular guidance, influences building and architecting next generation data management platforms on a group of core technologies. Contributes to developing, maintaining, and optimizing data management solutions that ensure high availability of data availability, data scalability, data quality, data integrity and data security. Contributes to exploring new datasets, promoting data discovery and understanding, revising existing data and building and maintaining data views and aggregate data series of low complexity. Helps to query datasets and cleans/transforms data of low complexity.
- Has an intermediate understanding of new/key technologies and platforms and how to incorporate third party APIs and open source/reusable components. Uses intermediate knowledge of new/key technologies to begin to influence the implementation of innovative solutions.
- Contributes to utilizing lean and agile software development practices such as test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, and deployment, version control, and simple design to create quality, reusable code. Assists with writing or improving code to handle complex data processing tasks, or rewriting old processes written in older languages. Contributes to collecting ongoing data updates from external sources to establish and maintain software code used to convert raw data into usable formats.
- With regular guidance, creates and maintains programs and processes necessary to provide data for production and research. Contributes to implementing processes and programs that monitor data quality, logging and responding to production issues, and ensures production data is always accurate and available for key stakeholders/customers and business processes that depend on it.
- Assists with product development of internal systems, tools and platforms supporting operational capabilities. Contributes to transitioning existing products out of legacy technology platforms. May contribute to creating new products as ad hoc requests arise.
- Assists with integrating data from multiple sources to employ simple features of integration technologies. Contributes to developing recommendations and providing guidance related to data integration strategy in order to meet future reporting and analytic needs.
- With regular guidance, influences the designing, constructing, and implementing of a database system to meet strategic needs. Contributes to building data management systems that combine core data sources into data repositories to enable reporting and analysis of data. Builds up skills related to developing and maintaining data pipelines that ingest data from a wide variety of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data formats.
- With regular direction, identifies key opportunities for improvement and technical/process enhancement to increase operational efficiencies, address future technological needs, and reduce costs associated with the use of internal tools.
- Assists with safeguarding digital data throughout its entire lifecycle to protect it from corruption, theft, or unauthorized access. Has an intermediate ability to use tools and technologies that protect data in transit and/or at rest through processes like data masking, encryption, and redaction of sensitive information. Contributes to setting access permissions.
- Utilizes foundational to intermediate knowledge of key components of cloud computing and one or more cloud technology platforms. Assists with evaluating use cases to determine which cloud tools and services best fit a client’s needs.
- Contributes to gathering and analyzing various quantitative and qualitative data to provide useful information and actionable recommendations to clients. Based on data analysis, helps to illustrate and report data findings using intermediate knowledge of visual charts, figures, tables, and dashboards to tailor findings to specific audiences.
- Develops knowledge and awareness of and adheres to applicable governing standards.
- Assists with governing large volumes of both structured and unstructured data. Contributes to designing, developing, automating, and troubleshooting data flows and pipelines to process large quantities of data.
- With regular assistance, proactively troubleshoots, diagnoses, documents and resolves escalated support problems as assigned. Refines abilities in explaining technical problems/solutions to non-technical individuals, in order to provide context for how the issue was resolved.
- Assists with writing documentation for new and existing productions processes and data items. Helps to ensure up-to-date documentation is available and written in a clear and succinct manner.
Position Requirements:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus three years of experience. Must have intermediate knowledge in one or more of the following areas: cloud technology, relational and NoSQL database design/development, data analysis, data security, technology compliance, big data management, data workflow management and automation, data pipeline, data catalog, metadata management, data ingestion, data transformation and data exchange. Must be able to work effectively with more senior staff. Must be able to support more senior staff with technical support, database administration, technical problem solving, technical documentation, data visualization, code creation/maintenance, data integration, and production development/maintenance. Highly desirable skills include:
- 2+ years of experience with R programming for data manipulation, transformation, and analysis
- Experience with data wrangling and reshaping operations (e.g., pivoting, joins, aggregations)
- SQL proficiency for querying databases, creating views, and data extraction
- Experience working with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or similar)
- Familiarity with data validation and quality checks (range validation, completeness testing)
- Experience with version control using Git (e.g., GitLab, Github, or similar)
- Knowledge of data integration patterns (extracting data from APIs, databases, or files)
- Experience with R packages for data manipulation (e.g., dplyr, data.table, tidyr, or similar)
- Familiarity with distributed data processing tools (e.g., pyspark/sparklyr)
FR-25 Minimum Qualifications:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus four years of experience. Highly desirable experience in addition to FR-24 include:
- Basic understanding of cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure, Databricks, or willingness to learn Databricks)
- Experience writing clear documentation and working in collaborative team environments
- Familiarity with R Markdown or similar reporting tools
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines or automated deployment workflows
FR-26 Minimum Qualifications:
Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent plus five years of experience. Highly desirable experience in addition to FR-25 include:
- Demonstrated experience in project leadership and management
- Experience with Agile engineering practices including developing user stories and managing customer expectations.
- Experience in data architecture and design
This position requires an in-office presence in Washington, DC
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or application, membership, or service in the uniformed services.
Government Job Roles in Washington DC
See all Government Jobs in Washington DC
Sign up for free to filter by visa type, set job alerts, and find employers with verified sponsorship history.
Search Government Jobs in Washington DCGovernment Jobs in Washington DC: Frequently Asked Questions
Which government employers in Washington DC sponsor F-1 STEM OPT visas?
The primary sponsors in DC's government sector are federal contractors and government-adjacent research organizations. Companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, SAIC, MITRE, and Peraton have established STEM OPT sponsorship records in the DC metro area. Think tanks and federally funded research and development centers also participate. Direct federal agency positions are generally not available to F-1 STEM OPT workers due to citizenship requirements for most federal employment.
Which cities in Washington DC have the most government F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship jobs?
Washington DC proper has the highest concentration, particularly in areas like NoMa, Capitol Hill, and Foggy Bottom near federal agency headquarters. The broader metro area extends sponsorship activity into Northern Virginia cities like Arlington, McLean, and Reston, as well as Bethesda and Rockville in Maryland. Many government contractors maintain offices across this metro corridor, and roles are frequently listed across multiple locations within the same region.
What types of government roles typically qualify for F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship?
Roles that qualify are those mapped to STEM-designated Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes, as determined by your school's DSO. In the government sector, qualifying positions commonly include data analyst, cybersecurity analyst, software engineer, systems engineer, intelligence analyst with a technical degree, and research scientist roles at contractors or federally funded labs. The role itself must align with your degree field for the STEM OPT extension to apply.
How do I find government F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship jobs in Washington DC?
Migrate Mate lets you filter specifically for government sector roles in Washington DC that have F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship history, so you can target contractors and research organizations with verified hiring patterns rather than applying broadly. Because federal contractor positions vary significantly in their willingness to sponsor, filtering by actual sponsorship activity in the DC government sector gives you a more focused list than a general job search.
Are there any Washington DC-specific considerations for F-1 STEM OPT sponsorship in the government sector?
Security clearance requirements are a significant factor unique to DC's government contractor market. Many roles at defense and intelligence contractors require U.S. citizenship or permanent residency for clearance eligibility, which limits F-1 STEM OPT workers to positions that do not require clearances. Identifying contractors that separate their cleared and non-cleared hiring pipelines is important. Additionally, government contractors in DC must comply with E-Verify requirements, meaning your employment authorization will be verified through that federal system from day one.