Lead Software Engineer - Databricks, Spark, AWS

Job Description

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

 

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.
• 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
• 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
• 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).
• 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.
• CI/CD and automation tooling for data (Git workflows, artifact management) and testing frameworks (pytest, JUnit).
• Observability for data systems (freshness/completeness metrics, lineage, SLAs, alerting).
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries.

About Us

JPMorganChase, one of the oldest financial institutions, offers innovative financial solutions to millions of consumers, small businesses and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under the J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Our history spans over 200 years and today we are a leader in investment banking, consumer and small business banking, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management.

We offer a competitive total rewards package including base salary determined based on the role, experience, skill set and location. Those in eligible roles may receive commission-based pay and/or discretionary incentive compensation, paid in the form of cash and/or forfeitable equity, awarded in recognition of individual achievements and contributions. We also offer a range of benefits and programs to meet employee needs, based on eligibility. These benefits include comprehensive health care coverage, on-site health and wellness centers, a retirement savings plan, backup childcare, tuition reimbursement, mental health support, financial coaching and more. Additional details about total compensation and benefits will be provided during the hiring process. 

We recognize that our people are our strength and the diverse talents they bring to our global workforce are directly linked to our success. We are an equal opportunity employer and place a high value on diversity and inclusion at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute, including race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital or veteran status, pregnancy or disability, or any other basis protected under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for applicants’ and employees’ religious practices and beliefs, as well as mental health or physical disability needs. Visit our  FAQs for more information about requesting an accommodation.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Veterans

About the Team

Our Corporate Technology team relies on smart, driven people like you to develop applications and provide tech support for all our corporate functions across our network. Your efforts will touch lives all over the financial spectrum and across all our divisions: Global Finance, Corporate Treasury, Risk Management, Human Resources, Compliance, Legal, and within the Corporate Administrative Office. You’ll be part of a team specifically built to meet and exceed our evolving technology needs, as well as our technology controls agenda.