VP, Principal Data Engineer

LPL Financial is seeking a VP, Principal Data Engineer (onsite) in Fort Mill, SC to modernize the investor experience across the Reporting, Statements and Letters platforms. This role combines strategic direction with hands-on engineering to design and deliver enterprise data platforms, including cloud-native pipelines and real-time streaming solutions.

Role Summary

The position provides strategic and hands-on leadership to build scalable data capabilities at enterprise scale. The work includes defining standards and best practices, modernizing legacy architectures, and ensuring reliability, scalability, and compliance with service-level objectives.

Responsibilities

• Lead delivery of scalable, high-quality, cost-effective data solutions aligned to business priorities.
• Own end-to-end execution across engineering pods, balancing employee and vendor resources to optimize delivery and mitigate operational risk.
• Partner with business and technology leaders to prioritize initiatives, accelerate delivery, and improve engineering productivity.
• Mentor engineers and support engineering excellence, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Architect and build cloud-native data platforms for large-scale ingestion, transformation, validation, and distribution.
• Design, develop, and optimize ETL/ELT pipelines using Python, AWS, Snowflake, DBT, Airflow, and related tools.
• Develop event-driven and real-time data processing solutions using Kafka, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, and related technologies.
• Modernize legacy platforms through secure, resilient, reusable cloud-native architectures and patterns.
• Define technical roadmaps, engineering standards, and best practices for enterprise data capabilities.
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability, performance, and service-level objective compliance.
• Implement data quality, observability, auditing, reconciliation, and monitoring capabilities.
• Drive CI/CD adoption, DevOps automation, and operational practices to improve resiliency and efficiency.
• Lead root-cause analysis and resolution of complex production issues while optimizing cloud performance and cost management.
• Collaborate with architects, product teams, and business stakeholders to deliver modern data products and platform capabilities.
• Influence technical strategy, architecture decisions, automation initiatives, and continuous innovation across the data ecosystem.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing and developing large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines and data platforms using AWS, Glue, S3, RDS/Aurora, Snowflake, DBT, and Airflow.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience developing data solutions with Python.
• 6+ years of experience building event-driven and streaming architectures using Kafka, EventBridge, SQS, and related technologies.
• 6+ years of experience with relational and NoSQL databases, including performance tuning and optimization.
• 6+ years of experience with source control, CI/CD, and DevOps practices using GitHub, TeamCity, Jenkins, Octopus, or similar tools.

Technologies

• Python
• AWS, AWS Glue, S3
• RDS/Aurora
• Snowflake
• DBT, Airflow
• Kafka, EventBridge, SQS, SNS
• ETL/ELT
• GitHub, TeamCity, Jenkins, Octopus
• CI/CD, DevOps
• NoSQL, Relational databases
• AWS Associate-level certifications: AWS Certified Developer – Associate; AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Benefits

• 401K matching
• Health benefits
• Employee stock options
• Paid time off
• Volunteer time off

Core Competencies

• Technical leadership and architectural decision-making.
• Deep expertise in data engineering, ETL/ELT, and cloud-native platforms.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and strategic planning skills.
• Ability to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Proven ability to lead high-performing teams in fast-paced, agile environments.

Preferred Experience

• 5+ years of experience within financial services, wealth management, or brokerage organizations.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Copilot Chat, Cursor, or similar technologies.
• Experience with Terraform, infrastructure automation, and data lake implementations.
• AWS Associate-level certifications (AWS Certified Developer – Associate or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate).
• Experience leading enterprise cloud modernization and data transformation programs.
• Experience developing APIs and microservices using .NET technologies.
• Familiarity with GitHub Copilot and other AI-assisted development tools.

Compensation

Pay Range: USD 159,959 - 266,564 per yearly. Actual base salary varies based on factors including relevant skill, prior experience, education, base salary of internal peers, demonstrated performance, and geographic location.

Interview Information

• LPL will only communicate with job applicants directly from an @lplfinancial.com email address and will never conduct an interview online or in a chatroom forum.
• During an interview, LPL will not request any form of payment or information regarding an applicant’s bank or credit card.
• Questions about the application process can be directed to LPL’s Human Resources Solutions Center at (855) 575-6947.

Location

Fort Mill, SC (onsite)