Lead Data Engineer - End-to-End ELT on Snowflake & Cloud

First Citizens; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

First Citizens Bank is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and operate production-grade data pipelines in a cloud environment. You will own end-to-end delivery, set engineering standards, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team’s capabilities.

The role requires hands-on experience with ELT architectures, Snowflake, dbt, Python-based pipelines, and AWS services. Candidates should demonstrate leadership in design discussions and CI/CD-driven deployments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree and a minimum of 6 years in advanced data engineering, cloud platforms, and project or technical leadership.
• Or High School Diploma with a minimum of 10 years in advanced data engineering, data technologies, cloud platforms, and project or technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate data pipelines using Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold).
• Own ingestion, transformation, governance, testing, and publishing layers.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency of pipelines.
• Implement CDC and batch ingestion using Qlik Replicate.
• Design ingestion patterns for databases, files, and APIs.
• Build reusable Python-based pipeline components and frameworks.
• Develop dbt models using advanced SQL and Jinja templating.
• Implement automated testing for data quality, schema validation, and freshness.
• Enable CI/CD-driven transformation deployments.
• Implement Snowpipe, Tasks, Streams, and Stored Procedures.
• Design and enforce RBAC, dynamic masking, and tag-based access control.
• Ensure data security and compliance through platform-level controls.
• Build and deploy data components using AWS services such as S3, Lambda, ECS Fargate, Glue, DynamoDB, and IAM, or equivalent Azure services.
• Collaborate on CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and environment promotion.
• Serve as a technical leader and mentor junior and mid-level data engineers.
• Lead design discussions, code reviews, and technical decision-making.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices and standards.

Skills

Medallion Architecture

CDC Ingestion

Python

dbt

SQL

Jinja templating

CI/CD

Data governance

Cloud AWS

RBAC

Automation

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in a related field

High School Diploma / GED

Tools

Qlik Replicate

Snowflake

dbt Cloud

AWS

Job description

First Citizens Bank is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and operate production-grade data pipelines in a cloud environment. You will own end-to-end delivery, set engineering standards, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team’s capabilities.

The role requires hands-on experience with ELT architectures, Snowflake, dbt, Python-based pipelines, and AWS services. Candidates should demonstrate leadership in design discussions and CI/CD-driven deployments.