Senior Data Platform Engineer, Snowflake

Job Description:

Title:

Senior Data Platform Engineer

Location:

Remote – USA, Canada

Reports to:

SVP, Engineering

Vacancy:
New vacancy

The Role:

Own the hands-on engineering of JD Power’s Snowflake data platform. Responsible for translating the Platform Lead’s architecture and governance direction into a production-grade, automated, and observable Snowflake environment that supports analytics, product, and AI/ML workloads across the enterprise.

The Scope & Ownership You Will Have in This Role:
Owns

• Snowflake account, warehouse, and object architecture.
• Infrastructure-as-Code repository and CI/CD for all Snowflake changes.
• RBAC implementation, security controls, and identity integration.
• Ingestion and integration patterns (Snowpipe, Streams/Tasks, managed connectors).
• Platform observability, cost monitoring, and performance tuning.
• Documentation, runbooks, and onboarding patterns for platform consumers.

Does not own

• Governance policy and strategy (owned by the Platform Lead).
• Business data modeling and semantic layer (owned by Analytics Engineering).
• Source system data quality at point of capture (owned by upstream teams).

What You’ll Be Doing in This Role:
Platform engineering

• Design and evolve Snowflake account, warehouse, and object architecture.
• Implement and maintain all Snowflake objects, roles, and policies in Terraform.
• Operate database CI/CD using Schema change, Liquibase, or equivalent.
• Tune performance: clustering, search optimization, materialized views, query profiling.

Security and governance enforcement

• Build and maintain the functional/access role hierarchy enforcing least privilege.
• Implement masking policies, row access policies, object tagging, and network policies.
• Integrate Snowflake with IdP for SSO/SCIM; manage service accounts and key rotation.
• Partner with Info Sec, Privacy, and Compliance on audit readiness and control attestation.

Ingestion and integration

• Operate Snowpipe, Snowpipe Streaming, Streams/Tasks, and Kafka Connector pipelines.
• Manage Fivetran/Airbyte (or equivalent) connector deployments and reliability.
• Implement Iceberg / external tables where lakehouse interoperability is required.
• Integrate with orchestration (Airflow / dbt Cloud) and observability tooling.

Operational excellence

• Define and meet SLOs for platform reliability, freshness, and cost.
• Build dashboards and alerting; lead incident response for platform issues.
• Document architecture decisions, patterns, and runbooks.
• Enable Analytics Engineering, Product Engineering, and Data Science consumers.

Qualifications of this Role:

• 5+ years of professional data platform, data engineering, or data infrastructure experience.
• 3+ years of hands‑on Snowflake experience at production scale (not pilot/POC).
• Demonstrated expertise in Snowflake RBAC design, warehouse sizing and cost governance, performance tuning, and security features.
• Strong SQL — able to read and optimize a query profile.
• Python for tooling, automation, and pipelines.
• Production IaC experience — Terraform required;
  Snowflake provider strongly preferred.
• Database CI/CD using Schema change, Liquibase, dbt, or equivalent change‑management tooling.
• Cloud fluency in AWS — networking, IAM, storage, and Snowflake integration points.
• Ingestion experience with Snowpipe, Streams/Tasks, Kafka, and/or Fivetran/Airbyte.
• Communication — able to author decision records and runbooks; able to influence without authority.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

This position has a starting salary range of $120K -$150K USD/$110K -$120K CAD per year. This is the range we reasonably and in good faith expect to pay for the role at the time of posting. An employee’s pay within the range is determined by a number of factors, including relevant skills, education, qualifications, experience, performance, business or…