Lead Data Engineer

The Lead Data Engineer position is a 100% remote position but candidates must be located within 50 miles of any of the following locations:

• Morristown, NJ
• Atlanta, GA
• St Petersburg, FL
• St Louis, MO
• Plano, TX

The
Lead Data Engineer – Finance & Accounting
focus owns the design, development, and delivery of
scalable, cloud-native data services supporting finance treasury and accounting functions
, including financial reporting, reconciliation, billing, and operational accounting use cases. This role combines
hands-on data engineering
,
technical leadership
, and
end-to-end project ownership
, with accountability from solution design through production delivery.

The ideal candidate brings strong
finance and accounting domain experience
, deep expertise in
AWS and Snowflake
, and a proven ability to architect data platforms that ensure
accuracy, traceability, and audit readiness
while leading complex initiatives and mentoring engineers.

What You’ll Do:

- Own
end-to-end delivery of finance and accounting data service solutions
, from requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, deployment, and support
- Design and implement
Snowflake-based financial data architectures
, including accounting-ready data models and DBT transformation pipelines
- Build and maintain
high-reliability data pipelines
supporting financial reporting, reconciliations, close processes, and downstream analytics
- Lead cloud data engineering initiatives across the data platform supporting
general ledger, revenue, payments, claims, billing, and operational finance workflows
- Serve as
technical lead
on finance-focused projects, setting engineering standards, making architectural decisions, and ensuring delivery quality and timelines
- Partner closely with
Finance, Accounting, FP&A, and Analytics teams
to translate business and accounting requirements into scalable data products
- Ensure
financial data integrity, auditability, and traceability
, including controls, lineage, and reconciliation logic
- Mentor and guide data engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and hands-on technical leadership
- Establish and enforce
data quality, observability, and governance
practices aligned to financial and regulatory expectations
- Support
migration of financial data platforms from on-premises systems to cloud-based solutions
- Drive Agile delivery practices, participating in sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and release management
- Uphold data privacy, security, and compliance standards relevant to
financial and healthcare data

What You’ll Bring to Zelis:

- 7+ years of experience in data engineering, with
2+ years in a technical lead or ownership role
- Demonstrated experience developing data solutions for finance and accounting domains
, such as general ledger, revenue, payments, claims, billing, or financial reporting
- Proven experience designing and delivering
Snowflake cloud data warehouse solutions
- Strong cloud engineering experience supporting
financial data platforms
, including data lakes, pipelines, and cloud-native services
- Advanced SQL expertise, including complex joins, performance tuning, and reconciliation logic
- Experience building and managing
enterprise financial data warehouses and data lakes
- Hands-on experience migrating
financial data systems from on-premises SQL platforms to cloud environments
- Strong understanding of
financial data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, and analytics architecture. DBT strongly preferred

Preferred Skills:

- Proficiency in the creation, performance tuning and reverse engineering of complex SQL queries and stored procedures
- Python proficiency for data engineering, automation, and financial data processing a plus
- Experience supporting
financial close, reconciliations, audit reporting, and executive financial reporting
- Familiarity with
real-time or near-real-time financial data processing
- Working knowledge of Git, CI/CD pipelines, Azure DevOps, Jira, and Confluence
- Experience using
AI-assisted development tools
(e.g., Cortex AI, Cursor) to improve development velocity and code quality