Lead Data Engineer – Qlik/ Snowflake/ DBT

First Citizens Bank is seeking a Lead Data Engineer responsible for architecting, designing, implementing, and optimizing complex data solutions. The role involves leading the design and development of sophisticated data pipelines and analytics platforms while mentoring junior team members and collaborating with stakeholders to drive data-driven decision-making.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement scalable, efficient data architectures
• Lead the development of data strategy aligned with business objectives
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies to enhance data capabilities
• As a technical lead, implement complex data pipelines for real-time and batch processing
• Optimize data flows for high-volume, high-velocity data environments
• Develop advanced ETL processes for diverse data sources
• Drive, establish and enforce data governance policies and best practices
• Implement data quality frameworks and monitoring systems
• Ensure compliance with data regulations and standards
• Take charge, analyze and optimize system performance for large-scale data operations
• Troubleshoot complex data issues and implement robust solutions
• Mentor junior data engineers and provide technical guidance
• Be current on data technologies, recommend best practices and standards
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, leadership to drive data literacy
• Enforce/write unit test cases, validate/review the data integrity & consistency results, drive automated data pipelines using GitLab, Github, CICD tools
• Review & approve code promotions, enforce release management procedures to promote code deployment to various environments including production, disaster recovery, and support activities
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand data requirements and translate them into an efficient architecture solution

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree and 6 years of experience in Advanced data engineering, enterprise architecture, project leadership OR High School Diploma or GED and 10 years of experience in Advanced data engineering, enterprise architecture, project leadership
• Deep expertise in designing, building robust metadata-driven, automated data pipeline solutions leveraging modern cloud-based data technologies, tools for large data warehouse, database platforms
• Deep experience leveraging data security, governance methodologies meeting data compliance requirements
• Strong hands-on experience designing, building medallion architecture ELT pipelines, snowpipe, streaming frameworks using Qlik Replicate, DBT Cloud transformations, snowflake, GitLab with CICD
• Strong experience designing, building data integrity solutions across multiple data sources and targets like SQL Server, Oracle, Mainframe-DB2, files, Snowflake
• Strong design, development experience in Python/Pyspark, advanced SQL for ingestion frameworks and automation
• Strong experience architecting, building solutions using S3, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Glue, RDS AWS services
• Strong experience working with various structured and semi-structured data files - CSV, fixed‑width, JSON, XML, Excel, and mainframe VSAM
• Strong orchestration experience using DBT cloud, Astronomer Airflow
• Design, implement logging, monitoring, alerting, observability using tools like Dynatrace
• Strong experience in problem solving, performance tuning
• Design and implement schema drift detection and schema evolution patterns
• Strong experience designing, implementing sensitive data protection strategies – tokenization, snowflake data masking policies, dynamic & conditional masking, and role‑based masking rules
• Strong experience designing, implementing RBAC, data access controls, adopting governance standards across Snowflake and supporting systems
• Strong experience in enforcing, adopting release management guidelines, code deployment to various environments, implementing disaster recovery strategies, leading production activities
• Ability to make technical data decisions for key business use cases
• Ability to prioritize investment on new data-related technologies in conjunction with business units
• Must have one or more certifications in the relevant technology fields
• Financial banking experience is a plus