Senior Associate - Data Protection Engineer

New York Life•New York, NY

19d•$124,000 - $177,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As part of Technology, you'll have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking initiatives that shape New York Life's digital landscape. Leverage cutting-edge technologies like Generative AI to increase productivity, streamline processes, and create seamless experiences for clients, agents, and employees. Your expertise fuels innovation, agility, and growth — driving the company's success. The Data Protection Engineer plays a key role in advancing New York Life’s data governance & data protection initiatives. This individual contributor role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing data protection solutions and data governance workflows using platforms such as Databricks, Securiti.ai, Anomalo, & Atlan. Working closely with data governance analysts, product managers, and business/technology teams, the data protection engineer delivers capabilities like data scanning for PII/PHI detection, data protection using tokenization/masking and data risk measurement, monitoring and mitigation; supporting New York Life’s Data Strategy and enabling timely, data-driven decisions built on trusted information.

Requirements

5–7+ years of professional experience, including 2-3+ years in a data protection function.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
Strong understanding of data governance frameworks, data protection & remediation, tagging, data quality and metadata management concepts.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills and experience working across business and technical teams.
Strong proficiency with SQL, Python and data modeling/analysis concepts.
Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder management skills.
Hands-on experience with DataBricks, Securiti.ai, Anomalo, Atlan, or similar data governance/protection tools.
Prior experience with rollouts for data protection routines for PII/PHI structured & unstructured data with be a stand-out skill
Working in Agile environments using Jira, Confluence, and SharePoint.
Understanding of security and authentication patterns (AWS Secrets manager etc.) protection algorithms (tokenization/masking etc.)
Backend Development (Postgres DB, Data Modelling, Query optimization and indexing, Connection pooling, Strong SQL skills with the ability to analyze and validate data lineage etc.,)
Software development skills incl. but not limited to solutions design, deployment management (SDLC patterns, CI CD, leveraging Harness etc.) & testing (Unit testing, Integration testing, test automation, test suites etc.)

Nice To Haves

Prior experience with DSPM initiatives
Exposure to AI-enabled governance accelerators, metadata enrichment, cataloging. Use tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and similar applications for research, document analysis, summarization, workflow automation, QA, and prototyping.
Experience supporting data modernization or cloud migration initiatives in enterprise settings.

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain automated data protection routines for NYL’s democratized enterprise data lakes in AWS (RedShift, DataBricks) & GCP (BigQuery, PostgreSQL), for both structured & unstructured data.
Configure, test, and maintain Databricks, Anomalo, Atlan, Securiti.ai platform functionality, including building custom connectors and running BAU platform operations.
Build hands-on solutions, prototypes, dashboards, or lightweight applications using Python, SQL, Streamlit, Databricks, and related tools.
Collaborate with stakeholders to define data protection requirements for critical data elements and support remediation prioritization
Create clear documentation and reporting to communicate findings, standards, and recommendations.
Drive adoption of governance tools through road-shows, training sessions, user enablement, and data owner/steward playbooks.
Participate in Agile ceremonies by contributing to backlog building and sprint events in Jira.