Senior Data Reliability Engineer AWS

Empower • Overland Park, KS

4d • $105,700 - $149,275 • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Data Reliability Engineer to ensure the reliability, stability, and performance of our AWS-based data platform. You will troubleshoot production data systems, resolve incidents, and partner with engineering teams to meet business-critical SLAs and continuously improve operational practices. This role requires a strong Data Engineering foundation combined with production reliability experience. The ideal candidate has personally built data pipelines, supported them in production, diagnosed real-world data and processing failures, and implemented improvements to prevent recurrence.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building, operating, or supporting production data platforms, with significant recent experience in AWS environments.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, deploying, and operating production-grade data pipelines.
• Prior experience building data pipelines and seeing them through production, including exposure to real-world failures and operational challenges.
• Strong hands-on Python and SQL experience in production data environments.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting distributed data-processing systems such as Spark/EMR.
• Experience working with AWS data services such as EMR, S3, Glue, Redshift, DynamoDB, Lambda, or similar data services.
• Experience operating or troubleshooting cloud data warehouses such as Redshift, Snowflake, or similar platforms.
• Strong understanding of end-to-end production data architecture, including ingestion, processing, orchestration, storage/warehousing, data quality, monitoring, and downstream consumption.
• Experience handling production incidents and performing root cause analysis.
• Experience with data validation, reconciliation, backfills, reprocessing, and late or incomplete data.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work through ambiguous production data issues.
• Strong communication during incidents with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience troubleshooting complex Spark/EMR production workloads.
• Experience improving observability and alerting specifically for data pipelines and data platforms.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven data systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, or CDC patterns.
• Experience with Snowflake performance, workload, reliability, or cost optimization.
• Experience designing automated controls for data freshness, completeness, reconciliation, and anomaly detection.
• Experience with disaster recovery, backup validation, and resiliency testing for data platforms.
• Experience developing automation or intelligent tooling to improve data-platform reliability, troubleshooting, performance, or cost efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Own production data pipeline and platform reliability, resolving failures, delays, data quality issues, and performance problems.
• Troubleshoot distributed data-processing workloads across Spark/EMR, ingestion pipelines, and data warehouses such as Redshift and Snowflake.
• Lead or support incident response, perform root cause analysis, restore data safely, and implement lasting fixes.
• Define and monitor data SLAs for freshness, latency, and completeness and improve monitoring, alerting, and observability.
• Diagnose data issues including late-arriving data, incomplete loads, duplicate data, schema changes, and reconciliation failures.
• Perform safe backfills, reprocessing, and production data recovery while preventing duplicate or inconsistent data.
• Develop automation and tooling using Python and SQL to reduce operational toil, improve troubleshooting, and increase platform resilience.
• Identify and address data-platform performance and cost issues.
• Partner with Data Engineering teams to improve pipeline design, data quality, reliability, and production readiness.
• Support disaster recovery, backup validation, and recovery workflows.
• Create and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and operational documentation.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for production data systems.

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
• Education Level: No Education Listed