Senior Snowflake Platform DevOps Engineer

Empower is a company focused on transforming financial lives by providing a flexible work environment and celebrating internal mobility. The Senior Snowflake Platform DevOps Engineer will oversee the reliability, security, and cost efficiency of the Snowflake platform on AWS, designing and automating operations to support product and analytics teams.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and implementation of robust and secure Snowflake platforms and pipelines, spanning a wide range of technologies and complexity
• Stand up and manage Snowflake accounts/environments (dev/test/prod), databases, schemas, virtual warehouses, and resource monitors; enable auto-suspend/auto-resume and multi-cluster where needed
• Implement and operate ingestion and orchestration patterns using Streams/Tasks, Snowpipe/Kafka Connector, and external stages (S3)
• Enforce security, compliance, and access governance, including RBAC role hierarchies, tag-based masking, row access policies, network policies, and session parameters (SSO/SCIM with Okta/Entra ID)
• Manage Snowflake objects and configurations as code (Terraform Snowflake provider and/or Snowflake CLI) and build Git-based promotion workflows with pre-merge checks (grant diffs, policy linting, contract tests)
• Build observability dashboards and alerts for utilization, query performance, task/pipe health, failures, and data freshness/volume anomalies; tune performance and drive SLOs for latency, concurrency, and reliability
• Implement cost optimization guardrails including warehouse rightsizing, auto-suspend targets, query tagging, and chargeback/showback with unit-economics KPIs and variance reviews
• Operate secure integrations with AWS (S3, IAM/KMS, PrivateLink/VPC endpoints), catalogs (Collibra), and BI tools (Tableau/Qlik/BOBJ)
• Provide Level-3 support, lead incident response and postmortems with clear RCAs and fixes, and maintain/validate resiliency strategies and runbooks (including game days)
• Work independently on assignments in a GitOps-driven environment, collaborating with development teams to automate processes and increase productivity

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• At least 5 years of experience in platform or systems engineering, including designing, building, and operating large-scale applications
• 3+ years of hands-on Snowflake administration operating in cloud environments (AWS preferred)
• Snowflake expertise across RBAC design, masking and row access policies, object tags, Streams/Tasks, Snowpipe/Kafka Connector, search optimization, materialized views, and replication/failover
• Expert understanding of AWS infrastructure components, including EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, VPC, and others
• Production experience managing Infrastructure as Code frameworks such as Terraform and CloudFormation
• Proficiency with CI/CD tooling (GitHub and/or Azure DevOps), Git-based workflows, SQL, and one scripting language (Python, Go, Bash, or shell) for automation
• Strong grasp of Internet and cloud fundamentals (DNS, TLS, routing, SSH, HTTP/S), Linux/Windows administration basics, and IAM/KMS
• Expert knowledge in one or more DevOps disciplines such as code, CI, CD, operations, infrastructure, etc
• AWS, Kubernetes, or relevant certifications
• Production experience with Kubernetes clusters, with EKS and Istio service mesh experience preferred
• Experience with observability stacks (CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk), including Snowflake log exports and ACCOUNT_USAGE views
• Experience with BI/admin and data ecosystem integrations, including Tableau/Qlik/BOBJ, SAS/Alteryx connectivity to Snowflake, and Collibra integration for metadata/tag propagation
• Experience building high-availability and cost-efficient data platforms, including incident management and on-call rotations
• Customer-service mindset with crisp written and verbal communication, including explaining technical issues to non-technical partners
• Bias for automation and documentation, with comfort managing multiple priorities with accuracy and urgency