Principal Engineer Data Streaming

Empower is dedicated to transforming financial lives and offers a flexible work environment that promotes internal mobility and well-being. The Principal Data Streaming Engineer will be the enterprise technical authority for data streaming platforms, responsible for defining architecture standards and providing mentorship across teams to enhance data integration practices.

Responsibilities:

• Define, own, and approve enterprise architecture and technical standards for data streaming, CDC, and event-driven integration patterns
• Establish and enforce organization-wide best practices for Kafka and Striim implementation, including topic design, partitioning, schema evolution, pipeline configuration, reliability, observability, testing, and operational readiness
• Govern end-to-end streaming and CDC flows from source systems through Kafka and Striim pipelines to analytical and operational targets
• Lead architectural design, formal reviews, and approval of complex, large-scale streaming solutions spanning multiple source systems, platforms, and domains
• Serve as the highest-level technical escalation point for streaming platform design, performance, scalability, reliability, and production issue resolution
• Partner with enterprise architects, platform engineering, security, and governance teams to align streaming solutions with enterprise architecture and data strategy
• Establish standards for operational resilience, including replay capabilities, observability, and testing
• Influence platform roadmaps by evaluating emerging streaming technologies and recommending strategic investments
• Provide authoritative technical guidance through design reviews, documentation, and architectural decision records
• Drive adoption of event-driven and real-time integration patterns through technical advocacy and enablement
• Mentor senior, lead, and mid-level engineers to raise the maturity of data streaming and distributed systems practices

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 12+ years of software or data engineering experience with progressively increasing technical leadership responsibility
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Kafka and Striim in large-scale, production environments
• Extensive experience designing and supporting CDC and streaming integrations with Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redshift, and Snowflake
• Expert-level understanding of distributed systems, streaming architectures, and event-driven design patterns
• Demonstrated ability to define enterprise standards and exercise formal architectural approval authority
• Strong communication, documentation, and technical leadership skills