Lead Data Engineer

Royal Bank of Canada • Toronto, ON

19d • Onsite

About The Position

Global Functions Technology (GFT) is part of RBC’s Technology and Operations division. GFT’s impact is far-reaching as we collaborate with partners from across the company to deliver innovative and transformative IT solutions. Our clients represent Risk, Finance, HR, CAO, Audit, Legal, Compliance, Financial Crime, Capital Markets, Personal and Commercial Banking and Wealth Management. We also lead the development of digital tools and platforms to enhance collaboration.
The Retail Credit AI & Digital Transformation (ADT) Program aims to improve AI-enhanced underwriting capabilities will drive market-leading client acquisitions and best-in-class depth of client relationships. This program will enable us to train and operationalize new ML and AI models rapidly with improved deployment and maintenance patterns. This project focuses on advancing NextGen compute and engineering capabilities on public cloud and on-prem infrastructure, establishing data pipelines and feature stores with integrated data quality and governance for high-quality, traceable insights, and parameterizing the ML lifecycle to enhance delivery speed with improved controls, monitoring, and guardrails.

Requirements

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a closely related field at the Bachelor's or Master's level.
• 8+ years of experience combined in programming, small to large-scale applications with focus on full-stack development; 3+ year in team lead or similar capacity with full end-to-end ownership in delivering a project
• High-level expertise in programming languages such as Python, PySpark, highly proficient in both data and ML frameworks, such as Spark, Pandas etc. Experience with PySpark for Data Engineering/ETL pipelines
• Expert in DevOps practices and tools for CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and analytical thinking.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Champion best practices and in constant pursuit of engineering excellence, automation, and best in class user experience
• Experience with Agile development methodologies, including Scrum or Kanban, and the ability to apply these principles to lead the team
• Ability to drive technical innovation, including researching new technologies, evaluating technical options, and recommending technical solutions
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams
• Willingness to learn new technologies and adapt to new challenges

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with containerization using Docker and orchestration using Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Prior exposure in the Financial Industry, especially supporting top-of-the-house risk analytic functions (such as Market Risk, Credit Risk or Liquidity Risk), in the design and development of the regulatory frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Develop a feature store with integrated data quality and governance to ensure high-quality, traceable ML insights.
• Design and implement pipelines for feature extraction, transformation, and storage using scalable cloud solutions.
• Ensure data consistency, lineage, and metadata management to support regulatory and governance needs.
• Collaborate with data scientists to standardize feature definitions and promote reusability across teams.
• Implement reusable pipelines and MLOps solutions, to optimize machine learning models and other quantitative algorithms life cycle management.
• E2E technical competency including conducting data analysis, data preprocessing, and feature engineering to prepare datasets for model training.
• Work alongside data scientists, quantitative analysts, software engineers, data engineers, and domain experts to collect requirements and establish project goals.
• Document machine learning processes, methodologies, and results to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Benefits

• bonuses
• flexible benefits
• competitive compensation
• commissions
• stock where applicable
• Leaders who support your development through coaching and managing opportunities
• Ability to make a difference and lasting impact
• Work in a dynamic, collaborative, progressive and high-performing team
• A world-class training program in financial services
• Access to a variety of job opportunities across business and geographies.

What This Job Offers

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