Demo

Lead Data Engineer

Talener
Chicago, IL Full Time
POSTED ON 7/4/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 8/18/2026
Title: Lead Data Engineer

Location: Hybrid - Chicago (3x per week in office)

Client: Well-regarded investment manager known for a selective, high-conviction approach to partnering with external asset managers. Over 50 years in business, yet extremely innovative and consistently ranked a top place to work. Lean organization - minimal bureaucracy, high ownership, direct line of sight between your work and real business outcomes. The data team operates at the intersection of engineering, AI, and investment decision-making.

Role Description: This is a senior individual contributor / informal lead role on a small, high-impact data team. You'd be coming in to own the architecture and evolution of their data platform - not just building pipelines, but shaping standards, mentoring engineers, and driving adoption of AI/LLM capabilities across data workflows.

You'll partner directly with investment, research, accounting, marketing, and distribution teams to turn complex business needs into production-grade data products. First-principles thinking required - a lot of this work starts at the whiteboard before it gets to code.

This isn't a "maintain what's there" role. They want someone who can prototype, validate, and scale - and who takes ownership of systems and outcomes, not just features.

Required Skills

  • 10 years in data engineering or software engineering
  • Strong Python and SQL - production-grade, not academic
  • Proven experience designing scalable data architectures and pipelines end-to-end
  • Deep AWS experience (infrastructure, CI/CD, observability)
  • Snowflake (Cortex AI experience a plus)
  • Hands-on with AI-enabled applications and LLM tooling (Copilot, Claude, etc.)
  • DevOps fundamentals - Docker, CI/CD pipelines
  • Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation or Pulumi; Terraform a plus)
  • Database experience - Postgres, Aurora, or similar
  • 2-4 years leading projects or teams (formal or informal)
  • MUST HAVE EXPERIENCE WORKING IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES / FINTECH SPACE

Nice to Have

  • Experience designing internal data products or platforms
  • Data governance, lineage, or security framework knowledge
  • Front-end or full-stack exposure
  • Mentorship experience

Compensation

$180,000 - $200,000 base bonus.

For additional infirmation or to apply, please contact Bethany at Bmoulthrop@talener.com

Salary.com Estimation for Lead Data Engineer in Chicago, IL
$144,699 to $176,754
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