Senior Data Engineer

Cetera • Dallas, TX

2d

About The Position

Cetera Financial Group is seeking an innovative data engineer to help shape and extend its modern, cloud-native, AI-enabled data platform. The role focuses on delivering clean, automated, well-documented, and auditable data products for enterprise consumers and analytics, using Lakehouse architecture, cloud-native integration patterns, governed data contracts, and current data engineering practices.

The engineer collaborates with product owners, engineering leads, and data stewards to translate business and regulatory needs—including ingestion, lineage, PII protection, and data quality—into secure, extensible, and well-tested platform capabilities. The role uses AI-assisted software engineering while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and architecture, and supports downstream business intelligence and reporting models.

The position requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent experience, along with substantial programming, SQL, cloud data warehousing or Lakehouse, and data pipeline experience. Cetera offers a competitive salary and, for full-time roles, a benefits package that includes insurance, paid time off, retirement savings, parental and caregiver leave, and other benefits.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent experience.
• At least 5 years of programming experience with an advanced object-oriented language; Python is preferred.
• At least 4 years of hands-on SQL experience, including efficient high-volume data processing and support for high-performing ETL processes, data quality, and testing.
• At least 3 years of hands-on experience designing and implementing data warehousing or Lakehouse solutions on cloud-based platforms such as AWS, Databricks, or Snowflake.
• Experience with event-driven data ingestion patterns and Lakehouse table formats such as Apache Iceberg.
• Experience with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience with Agile development methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain ingestion, discovery, and consumption pipelines for file-based feeds, APIs, change-data-capture, and streaming sources using reusable, declarative data contracts.
• Collaborate with product owners, engineering leads, and data stewards to gather and implement requirements and align pipelines and contracts with prioritized business needs.
• Own end-to-end onboarding of new data sources, including pipeline development, field mapping, type management, enrichment, and quality and privacy rule definitions.
• Use orchestration and metadata systems to process event-, dependency-, and schedule-driven activities.
• Support and extend downstream data models used for business intelligence and reporting.
• Apply modern software engineering practices and ensure pipeline changes are specified and production-ready, with automated unit and end-to-end tests.
• Use AI-assisted development tools for coding, testing, and documentation while remaining accountable for correctness, security, and architecture.
• Participate in CI/CD and DevOps practices for data platform development, validation, and deployment.
• Monitor production pipeline health and data processing, troubleshoot issues, and route them to the appropriate remediation process.
• Maintain documentation, including operational runbooks, to capture and share platform knowledge and insights.

Benefits

• Inclusive health, dental, vision, and life insurance plans.
• Mental health benefits.
• 20+ days of paid time off, paid holidays, and 2 paid wellness days.
• 401(k) savings plan with company contributions up to 5%.
• Access to a financial professional for financial planning.
• Paid parental leave for birth, adoption, and fostering.
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account options.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• LifeLock identity theft protection.
• Pet insurance.
• Paid caregiver leave.
• Additional voluntary benefits.

What This Job Offers

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