Senior Data Engineer – DevOps [Gitlab, Terraform]

First Citizens Bank is seeking an experienced DevOps Engineer to design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation for their data engineering platform. The role involves working with cloud operations, enabling data engineers to deploy reliably and rapidly across AWS and Azure environments.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement robust CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitLab; automate build, test, and deployment processes for data applications, dbt Cloud jobs, and infrastructure changes
• Build deployment orchestration for multi-environment (dev, qa, uat, production) workflows with approval gates, rollback mechanisms, and artifact management
• Implement GitOps practices for infrastructure and application deployments; maintain version control and audit trails for all changes
• Optimize pipeline performance, reduce deployment times, and enable fast feedback loops for rapid iteration
• Design and manage Snowflake, AWS and Azure infrastructure using Terraform; ensure modularity, reusability, and consistency across environments
• Provision and manage Cloud resources
• Implement tagging strategies and resource governance; maintain Terraform state management and implement remote state backends
• Support multi-cloud architecture patterns and ensure portability between AWS and Azure where applicable
• Deploy and manage Ansible playbooks for configuration management, patching, and infrastructure orchestration across cloud environments
• Utilize Puppet for infrastructure configuration, state management, and compliance enforcement; maintain Puppet modules and manifests for reproducible environments
• Automate VM provisioning, OS hardening, and application stack deployment; reduce manual configuration and ensure environment consistency
• Build automation for scaling, failover, and disaster recovery procedures
• Automate Snowflake provisioning, warehouse sizing, and cluster management via Terraform; integrate Snowflake with CI/CD pipelines
• Implement Infrastructure as Code patterns for Snowflake roles, permissions, databases, and schema management
• Build automated deployment workflows for dbt Cloud jobs and Snowflake objects; integrate version control with Snowflake changes
• Monitor Snowflake resource utilization, costs, and performance; implement auto-suspend/auto-resume policies and scaling strategies
• Develop Python scripts and tools for infrastructure automation, cloud operations, and deployment workflows
• Build custom integrations between CI/CD systems, cloud platforms, and Snowflake; create monitoring and alerting automation
• Integrate monitoring and logging solutions (Splunk, Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor) into CI/CD and infrastructure stacks
• Build automated alerting for infrastructure health, deployment failures, and performance degradation
• Implement centralized logging for applications, infrastructure, and cloud audit trails; maintain log retention and compliance requirements
• Create dashboards and metrics for infrastructure utilization, deployment frequency, and change failure rates
• Support deployment of data processing jobs, Airflow DAGs, and dbt Cloud transformations through automated pipelines
• Implement blue-green or canary deployment patterns for zero-downtime updates to data applications
• Build artifact management workflows (Docker images, Python packages, dbt artifacts); integrate with Artifactory or cloud registries
• Collaborate with data engineers on deployment best practices and production readiness reviews
• Design backup and disaster recovery strategies for data infrastructure; automate backup provisioning and testing
• Implement infrastructure redundancy and failover automation using AWS/Azure native services
• Maintain comprehensive documentation for infrastructure architecture, CI/CD workflows, and operational procedures
• Create runbooks and troubleshooting guides for common issues; document infrastructure changes and design decisions
• Establish DevOps best practices and standards; share knowledge through documentation, lunch-and-learns, and mentoring

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
• CI/CD tools: Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitLab CI/CD (hands-on pipeline development)
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (AWS and Azure providers) — production-grade experience
• Configuration Management: Ansible and/or Puppet — ability to write playbooks/manifests and manage infrastructure state
• Cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM, Lambda, Glue, Lakeformation) and Azure (VMs, App Services, Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, networking)
• Python programming: scripting, automation, API integration, and tooling development
• Snowflake: operational knowledge of warehouse management, cost optimization, and cloud integration
• Git/GitLab/GitHub: version control, branching strategies, and repository management
• Linux/Unix system administration and command-line proficiency
• Networking fundamentals: VPCs, subnets, security groups, DNS, load balancing
• Scripting languages: Bash, Python, or similar for automation
• 5+ years in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering
• 3+ years hands-on with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code
• 3+ years with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar)
• 2+ years with configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, or similar)
• 2+ years supporting cloud platforms (AWS and/or Azure in production)
• 1+ years with Python automation and scripting
• Experience supporting or integrating with Snowflake or modern data warehouses
• Financial banking experience is a plus
• Must have one or more certifications in the relevant technology fields