Principal Data Engineer - FLINK

Principal Data Engineer – Real-Time Streaming (Flink) Role Summary

As a Principal Data Engineer (Real-Time Streaming – Flink), you will be chartered with designing, developing, and operating real-time data systems that drive critical business outcomes. You will lead a team of data engineers and partner with stakeholders to build scalable, event-driven streaming architectures that enable low‑latency data access across Citizens business operations.

• Serve as a key contributor to the development of real‑time data solutions, partnering with stakeholders to define streaming use cases, SLAs, and latency expectations.
• Design and implement event‑driven streaming architectures using Flink and related ecosystem technologies.
• Engineer and optimize low‑latency, high‑throughput data pipelines for operational and analytical workloads.
• Develop and maintain stateful stream processing applications, including windowing, joins, aggregations, and complex event processing.
• Continuously assess data flow across systems, identifying latency bottlenecks, failure points, and data integrity risks, with a focus on real‑time processing gaps.
• Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting for streaming systems to ensure availability, performance, and SLA adherence.
• Ensure operational resiliency and stability, including checkpointing, fault tolerance, exactly‑once semantics, and recovery strategies in Flink pipelines.
• Lead the development of streaming data models and schemas aligned to business outcomes and event contracts.
• Govern and evolve event schemas and contracts to support enterprise‑wide interoperability and data consistency.
• Guide engineering teams on best practices for distributed streaming systems, including back‑pressure management, scaling, and partitioning strategies.
• Partner with architecture and platform teams to define standards for real‑time data platforms, security, and regulatory compliance within a banking environment.
• Mentor engineers and drive adoption of streaming‑first design patterns within Agile delivery teams.

• Advanced expertise in Flink
• Strong experience with event streaming platforms
• Deep understanding of distributed systems design, including fault tolerance, scaling, and high availability
• Experience building stateful stream processing pipelines with windowing, joins, and event‑time processing
• Proficiency in low‑latency pipeline design and performance optimization
• Experience with cloud‑native streaming architectures
• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, and/or Python with streaming frameworks
• Familiarity with schema management
• Experience integrating streaming data with downstream systems (data lakes, data warehouses, APIs, analytics platforms)
• Knowledge of real‑time analytics and monitoring tools
• Understanding of data governance, lineage, and compliance in real‑time data environments

• Enable real‑time decision‑making across banking operations
• Reduce data latency from hours to seconds/minutes, improving responsiveness of business processes
• Improve data reliability and trust through resilient, fault‑tolerant streaming pipelines
• Support digital and event‑driven business models, including real‑time customer experiences
• Increase operational efficiency by unifying batch and streaming data architectures
• Strengthen regulatory and risk capabilities through timely and accurate data availability
• Drive enterprise scalability, enabling growth in transaction volumes and data complexity

• 8+ years of data engineering experience with demonstrated leadership in streaming data platforms
• Hands‑on experience implementing Flink in production environments
• Experience in financial services or banking, with understanding of real‑time data use cases such as payments, fraud, or trading
• Experience managing or mentoring engineering teams in Agile delivery environments
• Familiarity with machine learning integration in streaming pipelines (real‑time scoring/inference)
• Experience with BI and analytics tools to consume streaming outputs
• Bachelor’s degree required;
  Master’s preferred in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline
• Certification…