Lead Data Engineer

RBC • Toronto, ON

21d • Onsite

About The Position

Are you a hands-on data platform engineer who thrives on building cloud-native, high-scale data platforms and enabling teams on top of them? Come join us! Global Functions Technology (GFT) partners across RBC to deliver transformative platforms and solutions. In Anti-Money Laundering (AML), we are building a new Data Foundation Hub to ingest enterprise data and power analytics and controls using a medallion architecture. As a Lead Data Platform Engineer, you will be a senior individual contributor and technical lead, owning the design and build of our AWS-based data platform and mentoring other engineers. You will work 70–80% hands-on across AWS (EKS, S3, RDS, EMR, Glue, Airflow), Snowflake, Spark, and dbt to deliver cloud-native, governed, and reliable data systems.

Requirements

• 7+ years delivering production data pipelines and distributed systems at scale on cloud platforms; demonstrated ability to operate as a senior IC and technical lead influencing architecture and quality across a team.
• Hands-on with S3, Glue, EMR, EKS, and RDS; proficiency with IaC (CloudFormation or Terraform), IAM least-privilege design, VPC/networking, and security baselines.
• Hands-on with Snowflake Streams, Tasks, Snowpark, and Snowpipe; strong SQL and warehouse design; performance optimization across compute and storage.
• Production experience with Spark (PySpark/Scala) for large-scale batch processing, optimization, and tuning.
• Medallion architecture patterns (Bronze/Silver/Gold), schema evolution, SCD/CDC, partitioning, and end-to-end pipeline performance tuning.
• Airflow (or equivalent) for DAGs, SLAs, retries, idempotency, and observability; Git-based workflows and CI/CD for data pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions/Jenkins).
• Designing for HA/DR (multi-AZ, backup/restore, RPO/RTO); encryption, secrets management, and network security in partnership with Platform/SRE.
• Ownership of automated testing (unit, integration, data contract), environment promotion, and versioned artifacts.
• Strong ownership, structured problem-solving, and clear technical communication; experience with incident response and postmortems.

Nice To Haves

• Development, testing, documentation, and deployment of transformations with dbt.
• Metrics, tracing, and logging practices across data pipelines and platform components.
• OAuth2/OIDC, data masking/tokenization, PII handling, and regulatory awareness in financial services or AML.
• Prior experience in financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect, Data Engineer) and hands-on familiarity with SageMaker or additional AWS-native data services.
• DQ frameworks, source-to-target reconciliation, lineage tooling, and purge/retention strategies.
• Exposure to legacy Hadoop stack where relevant to integration patterns.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for the AML Data Foundation Hub on AWS.
• Mentor and coach engineers (tech design reviews, pair programming, standards), influencing quality and delivery.
• Design and build secure, scalable data platforms using AWS S3, Glue, EMR, RDS, and EKS.
• Define patterns for data lake and warehouse integration (e.g., S3 + Snowflake) including partitioning, storage classes, encryption, and cost optimization.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., CloudFormation/Terraform) for repeatable environments, networking, IAM roles/policies, and security baselines.
• Design and build batch and incremental pipelines across Bronze/Silver/Gold layers using Snowflake (Streams, Tasks, Snowpark), Spark on EMR, and dbt.
• Implement schema evolution, SCD/CDC, partitioning, and performance tuning across both compute and storage (S3, EMR, Snowflake, RDS).
• Engineer resilient, observable ingestion patterns into S3/Snowflake/RDS.
• Orchestrate pipelines using Airflow (or equivalent) and/or AWS-native services (e.g., event triggers), enforcing SLAs, retries, idempotency, and alerting.
• Build operational dashboards and alerts for pipeline health, platform capacity, and cost.
• Design for high availability, resiliency, and disaster recovery (multi-AZ,/region backup/restore, RPO/RTO-aware architectures).
• Implement secrets management, encryption, IAM least-privilege, and network security in partnership with Security and Platform/SRE.
• Participate in incident response and postmortems; drive root-cause fixes and hardening of the platform.
• Own CI/CD for data and platform components: code review, environment promotion, automated tests (unit, integration, data contract), and versioned artifacts.
• Partner with Platform/SRE on SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and platform standardization across squads.
• Translate AML business and control objectives into technical roadmaps, platform capabilities, and reusable patterns.

Benefits

• Work in a dynamic, collaborative, progressive, and high-performing team
• Opportunities to do challenging work, make a difference and lasting impact
• Continuous learning and flexibility to work on projects that you are passionate about
• Leaders who support your development through coaching and managing opportunities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed