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 Schemachange, 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 InfoSec, 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 — Terrafo