Senior AWS Data Reliability Engineer

Empower; United States; Hybrid; USD 106,000 - 149,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Life insurance

401(k) matching

Tuition reimbursement

Casual environment

Paid time off

Volunteer time off

Leave programs

BRGs

Job summary

Empower is seeking a hands-on Senior Data Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, stability, and operational excellence of our AWS-based data platform in the United States.

You will work with data and platform engineering teams to diagnose issues, resolve production incidents, and influence better design and operational practices across the data ecosystem. Expect on-call rotations and a strong focus on DR and observability.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of experience working with production data platforms in AWS environments.
• Experience building data pipelines and seeing them through production, including exposure to real-world failures and operational challenges.
• Strong experience with Python and SQL in real data systems.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting distributed data processing systems (e.g., Spark/EMR, Redshift, streaming systems).
• Proven ability to debug and resolve production issues in data pipelines and data platforms.
• Experience with AWS data services (such as EMR, Redshift, DynamoDB, S3, or similar).
• Experience handling production incidents and performing root cause analysis.
• Strong problem-solving mindset and ability to work through ambiguous production issues.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and stability of production data pipelines and data platform services.
• Diagnose and resolve data pipeline failures, delays, and data quality issues in production environments.
• Investigate issues across distributed data systems (e.g., Spark/EMR workloads, ingestion pipelines, warehouse performance).
• Lead or support incident response, including triage, mitigation, and long-term resolution.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement durable fixes to prevent recurrence.
• Define and improve data SLAs (freshness, latency, completeness) and ensure adherence.
• Design and enhance monitoring, alerting, and observability for data systems.
• Develop automation and tooling to reduce operational toil and improve system resilience.
• Contribute to disaster recovery (DR) and resiliency planning, including backup validation and recovery workflows.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve pipeline design, reliability, and operational readiness.
• Create and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and operational documentation.
• Participate in occasional off-hours support for production data systems when required.

Skills

Python

SQL

Spark/EMR

Data pipelines

AWS

Incident response

Root cause analysis

Tools

EMR

Redshift

DynamoDB

S3

Kafka

Kinesis

Job description

Empower is seeking a hands-on Senior Data Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, stability, and operational excellence of our AWS-based data platform in the United States.

You will work with data and platform engineering teams to diagnose issues, resolve production incidents, and influence better design and operational practices across the data ecosystem. Expect on-call rotations and a strong focus on DR and observability.