Sr Data Engineer- Data Platform & AI Enablement

Citizens Bank; Johnston (RI); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Citizens Bank seeks a Senior Data Engineer to design and maintain secure, scalable data pipelines and platforms. You will advance data frameworks for financial data across consumer domains, supporting analytics, ML, and GenAI workflows.

Responsibilities include building robust pipelines, contributing to architecture, and ensuring data quality and governance in a regulated banking environment. Collaboration with engineers and data scientists is essential.

Qualifications

• 6–8+ years of data engineering and distributed data processing experience.
• Experience with streaming technologies (Spark/Beam/Flink) and message brokers (Kafka).
• Strong programming skills in Java/Scala; Python preferred.
• Proficiency in SQL and in relational databases (Redshift, PostgreSQL, Snowflake) and NoSQL (MongoDB).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and platforms.
• Develop data architectures and enable AI/GenAI-ready data capabilities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver data solutions meeting business needs.
• Implement data governance, security, and compliance controls.
• Ensure observability, reliability, and performance of data pipelines.

Skills

Streaming tech

Kafka

Microservices

Batch processing

Java

Scala

Python

SQL

Relational databases

NoSQL

CI/CD

Git

Bitbucket

ETL tools

Spring Boot

React/TypeScript/Angular

Cloud (AWS/Azure)

GenAI/AI concepts

Data governance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Talend

DataStage

ZooKeeper

Job description

Description

Senior Data Engineer – Enterprise Data Enablement

The Enterprise Data Enablement team is seeking a Senior Data Engineer who can design, develop, and maintain secure, scalable, and efficient data pipelines and platforms. This role will focus on building and deploying data solutions across financial consumer business domains by leveraging existing and new data framework capabilities to acquire, transform, stream, and integrate data. The candidate will also contribute to innovative data engineering solutions, including AI/GenAI/Agentic AI-ready data capabilities, while collaborating with and supporting a team of data engineers in building scalable, secure, and intelligent data platforms.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain reliable, efficient, and scalable data pipelines to acquire, transform, and store large datasets.
• Develop robust data pipelines to collect, process, and compute metrics from various financial data sources while adhering to quality and development standards.
• Contribute to application architecture and technical solutions, and help implement data framework patterns alongside senior engineers and architects.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver optimal data solutions that meet business and platform needs.
• Develop and deploy high-quality, production-ready code.
• Apply strong database design principles and data modeling techniques to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions.
• Develop and optimize data models to support analytics, reporting, machine learning, and AI-driven use cases.
• Support the implementation and enhancement of enterprise data frameworks and contribute to scalable solutions.
• Identify opportunities to improve existing frameworks and help build reusable capabilities across the organization.
• Troubleshoot and resolve data-related issues in a timely manner.
• Execute unit testing for data pipelines, validate results, and ensure data quality and accuracy; partner with business users for User Acceptance Testing and support deployment activities.
• Follow change management practices and ensure adherence to compliance and regulatory standards.
• Design and build data pipelines and platform capabilities that support AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI use cases, including model training, inference, retrieval, and orchestration workflows.
• Enable AI-ready data foundations by developing high-quality, governed, and reusable datasets for machine learning, large language model (LLM), and intelligent automation solutions.
• Develop and optimize pipelines for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to support GenAI use cases such as semantic search, document intelligence, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Partner with data scientists, ML engineers, architects, and product teams to integrate AI/GenAI capabilities into enterprise data platforms and workflows.
• Implement metadata, lineage, governance, security, and access controls required for responsible AI and enterprise-scale GenAI adoption.
• Ensure observability, reliability, performance, and data quality for data pipelines, including those supporting AI-enabled workflows.

Required Skills / Experience

• 6–8+ years of experience in data engineering and distributed data processing technologies.
• Hands-on experience with streaming technologies such as Apache Spark, Beam, or Flink.
• Experience with message brokers such as Apache Kafka.
• Experience working with microservices and batch processing systems.
• Strong programming skills in Java and/or Scala; Python experience preferred.
• Strong SQL development and performance optimization skills.
• Solid knowledge of relational databases (Redshift, PostgreSQL, Snowflake) and NoSQL databases (MongoDB or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and version control systems such as Bitbucket and Git.
• Experience with ETL development tools such as Talend or DataStage is a plus.
• Experience with Java Spring Boot; familiarity with React, TypeScript, or Angular is a plus.
• Understanding of cloud-based data processing, with AWS and/or Azure experience preferred.
• Experience building data pipelines that support analytics, machine learning, and AI workloads.
• Working knowledge of data engineering concepts supporting LLM-based applications, including retrieval pipelines, embeddings workflows, and unstructured data processing.
• Familiarity with AI/GenAI concepts such as RAG, semantic search, document processing, and model inference workflows.
• Understanding of data governance, security, lineage, and compliance requirements, particularly in regulated environments.
• Exposure to workflow orchestration frameworks and automation patterns is a plus.
• Exposure to vector databases, semantic models, or MLOps/LLMOps concepts is a plus.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively within technical teams.

Education, Certifications, and/or Other Professional Credentials

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technology field

Hours and Work Schedule

• Hours per Week: 40
• Work Schedule: Monday through Friday

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.