Principal Data Engineer - FLINK

Description

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.

In addition to core data engineering responsibilities, this role emphasizes Flink-based streaming platforms, event-driven data flow, and highly resilient distributed systems, ensuring that data is continuously processed, governed, and made actionable in near real time.

Specialized Responsibilities

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 usingFlink 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.

Preferred Technical Expertise

Advanced expertise inFlink

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

Business Outcomes and Impact

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

Preferred Qualifications

8+ years of data engineering experience with demonstrated leadership in streaming data platforms

Hands-on experience implementingFlink 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

Certifications in Big Data, AWS, Streaming Technologies, or Agile methodologies preferred

Modernization and Architecture Expectations

Champion shift from batch-centric architectures to event-driven, streaming-first platforms

Define and implement enterprise streaming architecture patterns

Establish standards for data contracts, schema evolution, and event governance

Build scalable, cloud-native streaming platforms aligned to enterprise architecture strategy

Integrate streaming with AI/ML platforms to enable real-time inference and intelligent automation

Drive platform reliability and engineering maturity, including automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code for streaming pipelines

Ensure all solutions meet security, compliance, and risk requirements specific to financial institutions

Some job boards have started using jobseeker-reported data to estimate salary ranges for roles. If you apply and qualify for this role, a recruiter will discuss accurate pay guidance.

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.

Background Check

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the candidate successfully passing a background check, which may include initial credit, motor vehicle record, public record, prior employment verification, and criminal background checks. Results of the background check are individually reviewed based upon legal requirements imposed by our regulators and with consideration of the nature and gravity of the background history and the job offered. Any offer of employment will include further information.

Benefits

We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more.

Awards We've Received

Glassdoor Best Place to Work in Consulting, Finance & Insurance

Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index 100 Award

Newsweek America's Most Charitable Company

The Banker's

US Bank of the Year

Dave Thomas Foundation’s Best Adoption-Friendly Workplace

Disability:IN Best Places to Work for Disability Inclusion