{"id":960640,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rewards-network-data-engineering-lead-hybrid","title":"Data Engineering Lead (Hybrid)","company":{"id":694071,"name":"Rewards Network","domain":"rewardsnetwork.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/rewardsnetwork","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":69,"open_postings":46,"ghost_share":0.522,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Chicago, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":190000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Airflow","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Redshift","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"GitLab","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-22T22:20:19Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-17","last_verified_at":"2026-09-29T02:23:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":68,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":67},"description":"About Rewards Network \nFor 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs. \nOur Culture \nAt Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential. \nJob Overview\nThe Data Engineering Lead is responsible for driving the modern data engineering foundation at Rewards Network while providing technical leadership across both data engineering and data science functions. The team is mid-migration -actively building on a modern stack- and this role exists to ensure disciplined execution, enforce architectural clarity and consistency. \nThe right person is a hands-on player-coach that is comfortable building teams as we invest in building out this competency as a core pillar of our long-term competitive advantage and strategy. That means assessing the current in-flight build and making deliberate decisions about what to keep and what to replace. Initially, the Data Engineering Lead will also manage the Data Science team, including acting as a key resource to the team, prioritizing work, and clearing roadblocks. \nThis is a hybrid position that requires in office presence 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago. \nWhat you’llbring to the table: (Responsibilities)\nEstablish and enforce architecture standards that ensure consistent designs that produce repeatable results. \nAssess the current state of our data infrastructure - evaluate what needs refactoring, and what should be replaced - then execute on that plan with the team. \nLead the continued build-out of the modern data stack, including ELT pipelines, stream ingestion, transformation logic along with storage and compute - serving as the technical authority when the team needs a decision made. \nHire and develop data engineering talent, grow the team with engineers experienced in modern ELT architectures and develop the existing team members through mentorship, code review, and technical leadership. \nDefine and maintain the data model RFC process, reviewing proposed changes, enforcing boundary discipline, and ensuring no undocumented changes promote to canonical layers. \nDirectly lead the data science team, setting priorities, managing workstreams, and translating business problems into clearly scoped DS projects - fostering a culture of accountability, technical rigor, and continuous improvement. \nOwn data pipeline monitoring and observability, ensuring production pipelines have appropriate alerting, data quality checks, and incident response processes so failures are caught early and resolved quickly. \n Provide regular visibility into team progress, architectural decisions, and risks to senior leadership, communicating tradeoffs clearly and escalating when business commitments are at risk. \nDo you have the right mix of ingredients: (Requirements)\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience) \n6-10 years of experience in data engineering or a closely related discipline \n2+ years in a technical lead or staff-level individual contributor role \nFamiliarity with data science workflows, ML model lifecycle, and MLOps concepts \nExpertise in data engineering - including model design, testing strategy, incremental patterns, and layer boundary governance\nExperience designing and enforcing data modeling standards in a team environment - not just building models, but establishing the patterns others follow \nDemonstrated ability to bring a team along technically - through code review, documentation, mentorship, and setting standards that stick \nFamiliarity with CI/CD for data pipelines (GitLab or equivalent) - including automated testing, deployment workflows, and environment promotion strategies \nExperience with data observability and monitoring - alerting on pipeline failures, data quality degradation, and freshness SLAs (familiarity with tools like Elementary, Monte Carlo, or equivalent) \nStrong decision-making under ambiguity - this role requires someone who can move forward with incomplete information and course-correct, not someone who needs consensus to proceed \nClear, direct communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders \nTechnical expertise in: Python, Apache Airflow, Apache Kafka, cloud data warehouses (Redshift, GBQ, Databricks) \n Education, Certifications and Experience: Preferred \nAdvanced degree in a technical field \nExperience at a company that has completed a similar legacy-to-modern warehouse migration \nPrior experience managing or mentoring data engineers \nWhat you’lllove about us: \nComprehensive benefits package, which includes:\nThis is a full-time, exempt position. The base salary range for this role in Chicago is $190,000-$220,000 annually, depending on candidate's experience, as well as skills, and other factors. This role is also eligible for an annual bonus target of 15%, bringing total target compensation to $218,500-$253,000.\nCompetitive Time Off Benefits: including flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and parental leave. \nGenerous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients \n401(k) plan with a company match\nTwo medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)\nPartnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free\nTwo dental plan options and a vision plan\nFlexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program\nAccident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans\nShort Term and Long Term disability \nCompany-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance \nEmployee Life Assistance Program\nHybrid working environment in a new office space downtown near the Metra Train stations and catered lunches on Tuesdays. \nRewards Network is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). We encourage and strongly support workplace diversity.\nExpected Pay Range\n$190,000—$220,000 USD","description_format":"text","description_chars":6660,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work","Life insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Loyalty Programs","Business & SME Lending"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-16T09:26:44Z"}],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.318,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":67,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/rewards-network-data-engineering-lead-hybrid","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/rewards-network-data-engineering-lead-hybrid.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-29T04:23:40Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4146,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":854,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-30T00:00:00Z"}}}