Demo

Lead Data Engineer

Balyasny Asset Management
Chicago, IL Full Time
POSTED ON 8/31/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 9/30/2026
Role Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Senior / Lead Data Engineer to provide technical leadership for the platforms, pipelines, and data products that power analytics, applications, and investment decision-making across the firm. You will architect scalable, cloud-first data solutions; set engineering standards; and lead small teams through delivery of reliable, analytics-ready datasets and services.

This role combines deep technical execution with mentorship, cross-functional partnership, and ownership of complex data initiatives. It offers the opportunity to take on people-management responsibilities over time.

What You'll Do
Lead the design and delivery of scalable ingestion pipelines, data models, and platform services using Python, SQL, Snowflake, and AWS.
Architect reliable solutions for structured, unstructured, market, and alternative datasets, with particular focus on performance, lineage, usability, and operational resilience.
Drive the evolution of the Data Acquisition Platform, including APIs, services, plugins, and AI-enabled workflows for onboarding, pipeline creation, metadata generation, and natural-language data access.
Establish and improve automated data-quality frameworks covering completeness, freshness, schema integrity, reconciliations, and business-rule validation.
Own technical standards for testing, observability, alerting, incident response, and production support across a large and growing dataset estate.
Lead root-cause analysis for complex, time-sensitive data incidents and drive durable corrective actions.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and technical coaching; help shape team practices and engineering culture.
Partner directly with Analysts, Quants, Portfolio Managers, and external data providers to translate requirements into robust end-to-end data solutions.
Evangelize data engineering best practices and influence technical direction across partner teams.
Potentially manage a small team, including prioritization, delivery planning, feedback, and career development.

What You'll Bring
Significant experience building and operating production data platforms, pipelines, and analytics-ready data products.
Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience across relational and NoSQL data systems.
Deep experience with Snowflake or comparable modern cloud data warehouses.
Strong hands-on experience with AWS data and cloud services, including designing secure, scalable, and cost-effective production architectures.
Experience designing and orchestrating production workflows with Airflow or comparable tools.
Cloud infrastructure experience in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Strong understanding of data modeling, large-scale dataset performance, time-series data, and temporal-query patterns.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects end-to-end, make sound architectural decisions, and improve existing complex systems.
A track record of mentoring engineers and communicating effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.

Nice to Have
Experience with Go and service-oriented platform development.
Experience applying AI/LLM capabilities to data engineering workflows.
Financial-services or market-data experience.

Salary.com Estimation for Lead Data Engineer in Chicago, IL
$139,661 to $170,604
If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Balyasny Asset Management

  • Balyasny Asset Management Chicago, IL
  • Description Summary We are seeking a Manager, Market Data Engineering to join the Data Technology team. You will lead the development of enterprise market-... more
  • 3 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Lead Data Engineer jobs in the Chicago, IL area that may be a better fit.

  • Hinshaw & Culbertson Chicago, IL
  • Lead Data Engineer Firm Overview Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP is a national law firm with more than 500 attorneys and professionals across the United States. F... more
  • 25 Days Ago

  • Capital One Chicago, IL
  • Do you love building and pioneering in the technology space? Do you enjoy solving complex business problems in a fast-paced, collaborative, inclusive, and ... more
  • 4 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!