Data Reliability Engineer

Empower • Overland Park, KS

7d • $87,400 - $123,400 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Data Reliability Engineer will own the reliability, stability, and operational excellence of an AWS-based data platform. This role will operate, troubleshoot, and improve production data systems to ensure data pipelines and analytics platforms are resilient, performant, and meet business-critical SLAs. The Data Reliability Engineer will work closely with data and platform engineering teams to diagnose issues, resolve production incidents, and improve design and operational practices across the data ecosystem.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or analytics platform roles, including 3+ years operating in a production cloud data warehouse environment such as Redshift or Snowflake.
• 3+ years of experience building AWS data pipelines and supporting them through production, including exposure to real-world failures and operational challenges.
• 3+ years of experience working with production data platforms in AWS environments, with a focus on anomaly detection, reconciliation, and end-to-end validation.
• 3+ years of experience with Python and SQL in real data systems.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting distributed data processing systems such as Spark/EMR, Redshift, and 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.
• Proven ability to handle production incidents and perform root cause analysis.
• Strong problem-solving mindset and ability to work through ambiguous production issues.

Nice To Haves

• Experience handling real-world data issues such as pipeline delays or failures.
• Experience with data backfills and reprocessing.
• Experience with late-arriving data or incomplete datasets.
• Experience improving observability and alerting specifically for data systems.
• Experience influencing or guiding data pipeline reliability and operational practices.
• Exposure to streaming or event-driven systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, and CDC patterns.
• Experience with disaster recovery, backup validation, and resiliency testing.
• Strong communication during incidents with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Prior FinOps or capacity-planning ownership for data platforms.
• Familiarity with BI semantic layers and contract enforcement at consumption, including Looker, Power BI, or Tableau.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and stability of production data pipelines and data platform services.
• Define, improve, and enforce data SLAs/SLOs for batch and streaming products, including freshness, latency, and completeness.
• Diagnose and resolve data pipeline failures, delays, and data quality issues in production environments.
• Investigate issues across distributed data systems, including Spark/EMR workloads, ingestion pipelines, and warehouse performance.
• Lead or support incident response, including triage, mitigation, and long-term resolution.
• Perform root cause analysis and implement durable fixes to prevent recurrence.
• 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 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, Standard Operating Procedures, and operational documentation.
• Participate in occasional off-hours support for production data systems when required.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Retirement savings – 401(k) plan with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%), financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time — 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) – BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior