Lead Engineer Data Streaming

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

Lead Streaming Engineer

The Lead Streaming Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and scaling modern data platforms that enable reliable, secure, and efficient data integration across the organization. This role partners closely with architects and cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality data solutions, while remaining hands-on in implementation, code reviews, and production support. The Lead Engineer drives engineering excellence, promotes best practices, and mentors team members to strengthen distributed systems and data engineering capabilities.

What you will do

• Design and implement scalable data platform solutions, including data streaming, CDC, data warehouses, data lakes, and ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Contribute to and help enforce platform standards, best practices, and design patterns for cloud-based data technologies.
• Build and support end-to-end data integration pipelines from source systems through Kafka/Striim (or similar) into analytical and operational platforms.
• Lead technical design discussions and contribute to architecture reviews for complex data solutions.
• Ensure high reliability and performance of data platforms through observability, monitoring, and proactive issue resolution.
• Act as a senior escalation point for troubleshooting production issues and optimizing system performance.
• Partner with platform engineering, security, and data governance teams to align implementations with enterprise standards.
• Promote an automation-first mindset by implementing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and testing frameworks.
• Contribute to operational resilience through robust error handling, replay capabilities, and validation strategies.
• Evaluate and adopt new tools and technologies to continuously improve the data platform ecosystem.
• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering strong engineering practices and technical growth across the team.

What you will bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Strong hands-on experience building and operating large-scale data platforms in production environments.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for data and platform engineering workflows.
• Experience with databases and data platforms such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Snowflake, and Kafka (or similar technologies).
• Familiarity with containerization and infrastructure tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Ansible.
• Strong programming and querying skills (e.g., Python, SQL).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, cloud architectures, and data engineering design patterns.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity.  All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.