Senior Data Engineer – DBT, Snowflake

First Citizens Bank is a financial institution that is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and optimize complex data solutions. This role involves leading the development of data pipelines and analytics platforms while mentoring junior team members and collaborating with stakeholders to drive data-driven decision-making.

Responsibilities:

• Data Architecture and Strategy - 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
• Hands-on Data Pipeline Development - Implement complex data pipelines for real-time and batch processing by ingesting, transforming data from staging layer to domain to consumption layers using Data Vault 2.0 models. Optimize data flows for high-volume, high-velocity data environments. Develop advanced ETL processes for diverse data sources
• Data Governance, Security & Quality Management - Establish and enforce data governance policies, best practices and implement data quality checks, standardization. Enforce Snowflake RBAC/ABAC, network policies/rules, masking/row access policies, tags, data classification, and least-privilege role hierarchies. Operationalize audit-ready controls (change management, approvals, runbooks, separation of duties, evidence capture)
• Data warehousing & modeling - Build performant Snowflake objects (databases, tables, streams, tasks, materialized views, warehouses) and optimize clustering/micro-partitioning
• Performance Optimization and Troubleshooting - Analyze and optimize system performance for large-scale data operations. Troubleshoot complex data issues and implement robust solutions
• Testing & Automation – Write unit test cases, validate the data integrity & consistency requirements, build automated data pipelines using GitLab, Github, CICD tools
• Code Deployment & Release Management - Adopt release management processes to promote code deployment to various environments including production, disaster recovery, and support activities
• Mentorship and Knowledge Sharing - Mentor junior data engineers and provide technical guidance. Contribute to the development of best practices and standards. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive data literacy

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree and 4 years of experience in Data engineering, big data technologies, cloud platforms OR High School Diploma or GED and 8 years of experience in Data engineering, big data technologies, cloud platforms
• Strong hands-on experience in building robust metadata-driven, automated, secured, governed data pipeline solutions leveraging modern cloud data technologies, tools for large data platforms
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating secure, audited, and cost-efficient data pipelines using medallion architecture on Snowflake—from raw ingestion to Data Vault 2.0 models and onward to business-friendly consumption layers (mart/semantic)
• Strong hands-on experience building, managing, packaging, deploying DBT Cloud data pipelines with advanced macros, SQL; automating testing strategies; and maintaining lineage
• Strong experience in Snowflake architecture, data classification, tagging & masking automation, Universal Search, performance tuning, security and cost optimization
• Strong hands-on experience building snowflake objects (tables, streams, tasks, materialized views) and optimize clustering/micro-partitioning
• Strong experience using Astronomer Airflow for orchestrating, scheduling data pipelines; and Terraform (with HashiCorp practices) for IaaC automation of pipelines
• Strong hands-on experience building data pipelines, data integrity solutions across multiple data sources and targets like SQL Server, Oracle, Mainframe-DB2, files, Snowflake
• Experience using S3, Lambda, SQS, SNS, Glue, RDS AWS services
• Excellent proficiency in Python, Pyspark, advanced SQL for ingestion frameworks and automation
• Experience in implementing logging, monitoring, alerting with Snowflake using ACCOUNT_USAGE/INFORMATION_SCHEMA, event tables, and integrating with Splunk, Datadog
• Strong experience designing, implementing tokenization, RBAC, masking policies, dynamic & conditional masking, data access controls across Snowflake and supporting systems
• Strong experience in adopting release management guidelines, code deployment to various environments, implementing disaster recovery strategies, leading production activities
• Experience in SCIM/SSO (Okta), MFA, ephemeral credentials, service-account hardening
• Internal dbt packages, reusable Terraform modules, project templates experience is a plus
• Experience with Iceberg/external tables; Kafka or event-driven ingestion patterns is a plus
• Experience FinOps for Snowflake, cost charge-back/show-back, warehouse auto-tuning is a plus
• Power BI/Looker metric-layer design; semantic modeling concepts experience is a plus
• Great Expectations, Monte Carlo/Anomalo/Atlan/Collibra/BigID integrations experience is a plus
• DBT mesh, custom materializations, Slim CI, state comparison experience is a plus
• Financial banking experience is a plus
• Must have one or more certifications in the relevant technology fields
• Team Player: Support peers, team, and department management
• Communication: Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills
• Problem Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills, incident management, root cause analysis, and proactive solutions to improve quality
• Partnership and Collaboration: Develop and maintain partnership with business and IT stakeholders
• Attention to Detail: Ensure accuracy and thoroughness in all tasks