Senior Data Engineer: Cloud Pipelines & Real-Time ETL

Motion Recruitment; Charlotte (NC); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Motion Recruitment seeks a Software Engineer in Charlotte, NC on a hybrid, 24-month contract with a leading Financial Services company. You will build data pipelines, optimize BigQuery and migrate workloads to GCP, working across on-prem and cloud environments.

The role requires 4+ years in data engineering, Ab Initio, PL/SQL/SQL, and Python/PySpark, plus experience with Autosys, Airflow, and data governance tools. Apply today to join a household-name institution.

Qualifications

• 4+ years Data Engineering experience or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
• 4+ years PL/SQL and SQL skills with proven experience in Oracle, Teradata, Python and/or BigQuery: complex query development, tuning, and debugging.
• 4+ years Ab Initio skills with proven experience to build complex graphs, Psets, performance tuning.
• 3+ years programming skills in Python; hands-on PySpark for distributed data processing
• 3+ years of ETL/ETL design, data warehousing concepts, and data modeling best practices

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable batch and near real-time data pipelines using AB Initio, Python, PySpark, PL / SQL and SQL to ingest, transform, and publish curated datasets across on-prem and Google Cloud platforms.
• Develop and optimize BigQuery transformations and data models, including partitioning, clustering, query optimization, and cost/performance tuning.
• Support modernization/migration from Teradata and Ab Initio workflows to GCP/BigQuery, including logic re-platforming, reconciliation, parallel runs, and controlled cutovers.
• Implement orchestration and scheduling for pipelines using legacy Autosys while driving migration toward Google Cloud Composer (Airflow), including dependency management, retries, SLAs, and backfills.
• Apply data governance and discovery practices using Dataplex: metadata management, dataset organization, classification support, and ensuring data is consumption-ready.
• Build and operationalize data quality controls using Informatica Data Quality: profiling, rule implementation, thresholds, exception handling, and embedding quality gates into pipelines.
• Ensure operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident triage/root cause analysis, and continuous improvements to reliability and performance.
• Implement secure data engineering practices: least-privilege access, PII handling/masking where required, retention controls, and audit-friendly documentation.
• Partner with product, analytics, and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into clear data contracts, curated datasets, and maintainable documentation (data dictionaries, reconciliation notes, operational runbooks).
• Must-have: Use AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Devin, or similar) to accelerate development while maintaining strong code review discipline, testing, and secure coding standards.
• Closely partner with Product Owners, Architects and Engineers on definition, design, development, integration, testing and support of reliable and reusable Data pipelines.
• Analyze highly complex business requirements; generate technical specifications to design ETL processes.
• Act as an expert technical resource for analysis and provides critical direction to less experienced staff. Work with team members to provide insight into solving complex problems with middleware while leveraging enterprise and industry best practices (including scalability, availability, maintainability, and flexibility).

Skills

Data Engineering

PL/SQL/SQL

Ab Initio

Python

PySpark

ETL/Data Warehousing

Tools

Autosys

Airflow

Git

Jenkins

uDeploy

Dataplex

Informatica

BigQuery

GCP

Job description

Motion Recruitment seeks a Software Engineer in Charlotte, NC on a hybrid, 24-month contract with a leading Financial Services company. You will build data pipelines, optimize BigQuery and migrate workloads to GCP, working across on-prem and cloud environments.

The role requires 4+ years in data engineering, Ab Initio, PL/SQL/SQL, and Python/PySpark, plus experience with Autosys, Airflow, and data governance tools. Apply today to join a household-name institution.