Lead Software Engineer - Databricks/Spark/AWS

This is your chance to change the path of your career and guide multiple teams to success at one of the world's leading financial institutions.

As a Lead Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase within Corporate Sector, Chief Technology Office, you are an integral part of an agile team that works to enhance, build, and deliver trusted market-leading technology products in a secure, stable, and scalable way. As a core technical contributor, you are responsible for conducting critical technology solutions across multiple technical areas within various business functions in support of the firm’s business objectives.

Job Responsibilities:

• Lead architecture and delivery of high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines using Databricks and Apache Spark (Core, SQL, Structured Streaming).

• Establish lakehouse patterns with Delta Lake (ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, Z-ordering, compaction) and ensure performance at scale.

• Drives team adoption of enterprise-authorized AI-assisted engineering practices within the work environment to improve code quality, delivery speed, and operational outcomes (e.g., AI-assisted code review/refactoring, test strategy acceleration, incident/root-cause analysis support), while establishing consistent validation standards (secure coding, peer review, automated testing) and promoting reuse of effective patterns across the team.

• Applies knowledge of tools within the Software Development Life Cycle toolchain, including enterprise-authorized AI-assisted development and automation capabilities, to improve the value realized by automation.

• Own Databricks cluster strategy and setup: runtime selection, autoscaling, driver/executor sizing, Spark configs, unit scripts, cluster policies, pools, and instance profiles.

• Orchestrate jobs with Databricks Workflows; integrate with AWS eventing and orchestration as needed.

• Design secure data ingestion and transformation frameworks leveraging AWS services:

  • S3 for data lake storage and lifecycle management
  • Glue for catalog/metadata and ETL jobs
  • IAM and Secrets Manager for role-based access and credential management
  • CloudWatch for logging, metrics, and alerting
  • Lambda for serverless utilities
  • Kinesis and/or Kafka/MSK for streaming ingestion

• Enforce data quality, lineage, and governance using Unity Catalog and/or Glue Catalog; embed expectations and validation into pipelines.

• Drive Spark performance engineering: partitioning strategies, file sizing, AQE, broadcast joins, shuffle tuning, caching, spill/memory control, and job right-sizing to optimize cost.

• Build reusable libraries, frameworks, and APIs in Python and/or Java; oversee unit, integration, and data validation testing.

• Implement CI/CD for data projects (Git-based workflows), Terraform Infrastructure deployments environment promotion, and automated deployments; champion engineering standards and code reviews.

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills:

• Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts and 5+ years applied experience.

• 10+ years of professional software/data engineering experience, including substantial production work with Spark on Databricks or EMR.

• Demonstrated experience leading effective use of approved AI-assisted software development tools (e.g., for coding, code review, test acceleration, troubleshooting) with the ability to set team expectations for validating AI outputs for correctness, performance, and security.

• Strong understanding of responsible AI use in engineering workflows, including data sensitivity considerations, secure handling of inputs/outputs, and adherence to resiliency and security expectations; experience coaching engineers on safe, compliant adoption within delivery practices

• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java for data processing, platform tooling, and automation.

• Hands-on Databricks expertise (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows, Repos/notebooks, SQL Warehouses).

• Solid AWS experience: S3, IAM, Glue, CloudWatch, Kinesis / MSK, DynamoDB

• Proven track record architecting and operating ETL/ELT pipelines (batch and streaming), with schema design/evolution, SLAs, and reliability engineering.

• Deep skills in Spark performance tuning and Databricks cluster setup/optimization.

• Strong SQL and analytics data modeling (dimensional/star schema; lakehouse best practices).

• CI/CD and automation tooling for data (Git workflows, artifact management) and testing frameworks (pytest, JUnit).

• Security-first mindset: roles/instance profiles, secret management, encryption-at-rest/in-transit, and network controls.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills:

• Experience with Delta Live Tables and advanced governance (catalogs, grants, auditing) in Databricks.

• AWS networking knowledge (VPC, subnets, routing, security groups) and data egress controls.

• Experience with Terraform for Infra deployments

• Cost optimization experience: autoscaling strategies, spot vs on-demand, auto-termination, storage layouts and compaction.

• Familiarity with Kafka/MSK or Kinesis Data Streams/Firehose for real-time ingestion.

• Observability for data systems (freshness/completeness metrics, lineage, SLAs, alerting).

• Demonstrated leadership in code quality, reviews, testing strategy, CI/CD, and technical mentorship; excellent communication with stakeholders.