Team Lead, Data Engineering at First Bank

First Bank of Nigeria Limited (FirstBank) is Nigeria’s largest financial services institution by total assets and gross earnings. With more than 10 million customer accounts, FirstBank has over 750 branches providing a comprehensive range of retail and corporate financial services. The Bank has international presence through its subsidiaries, FBN Bank (UK) Limited in London and Paris, FBNBank DRC, FBNBank Ghana, FBNBank Gambia, FBNBank Guinea, FBNBank Sierra-Leone and FBNBank Senegal, as well as its Representative Offices in Johannesburg, Beijing and Abu Dhabi.

Since its establishment in 1894, FirstBank has consistently built relationships with customers focusing on the fundamentals of good corporate governance, strong liquidity, risk management and leadership. Over the years, the Bank has led the financing of private investment in infrastructure development in the Nigerian economy by playing key roles in the Federal Government’s privatisation and commercialisation schemes. With its global reach, FirstBank provides prospective investors wishing to explore the vast business opportunities that are available in Nigeria, an internationally competitive world-class brand and a credible financial partner.

The Bank has been named “The Best Bank Brand in Nigeria” four times in a row – 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 – by the globally renowned “The Banker Magazine” of the Financial Times Group; and “Most Innovative Bank in Africa” in the EMEA Finance African Banking Awards 2014. FirstBank’s brand purpose is to always put its customers, partners and all stakeholders at the heart of its business, even as it is poised to standardise customer experience and excellence in financial solutions across Sub Saharan Africa, in consonance with its brand vision “To be the partner of first choice in building your future”. Our brand promise is to always deliver the ultimate “gold standard” of value and excellence. This commitment is anchored on FirstBank’s inherent values of passion, partnership and people, to position our customers first in every respect.Duties & Responsibilities

Technical Leadership: Direct, mentor, and inspire a world-class team of data engineers to deliver robust enterprise-grade data platforms and pipelines. Establish and enforce advanced engineering best practices, frameworks, and coding standards.
Architecture & Design: Architect scalable, high-performance, and resilient data solutions for structured and unstructured data across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Oversee data modeling, data warehousing, and metadata management initiatives.
Engineering Excellence: Lead the implementation of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), automated testing, and monitoring to enable rapid, secure, and reliable deployment cycles.
Data Security & Compliance: Ensure all solutions adhere to global data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), internal security frameworks, and bank policies. Drive data lineage, governance, auditing, and data loss prevention (DLP) strategies at every layer.
Stakeholder Management: Collaborate with data architects, analytics leaders, business stakeholders, and product owners to translate complex requirements into scalable technical deliverables with clear acceptance criteria.
Operational Resilience: Oversee production support, real-time monitoring, incident response, disaster recovery, and root cause analysis. Proactively resolve incidents and implement robust corrective and preventive actions.
Project & Resource Management: Manage project delivery, team resourcing, budgeting, and risk prioritization to meet aggressive timelines and service-level agreements (SLAs).
Continuous Improvement: Cultivate a culture of ongoing technical innovation, automation, and continuous learning to maintain a competitive edge in data engineering capabilities and technology trends.

Job Requirements
Education:

Minimum Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.
Master’s Degree or relevant certifications (e.g., Google Professional Data Engineer, AWS Certified Data Analytics) strongly preferred.

Experience:

8+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data architecture, or software engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical or people leadership role within complex, regulated environments.
Proven expertise in designing and deploying large-scale data platforms using modern data stack technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Flink, Hadoop, Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow), RDBMS/NoSQL databases, and real-time/streaming architectures.
Deep hands-on skills in Python, Java, Scala, or a similar advanced programming language; experience with API design, microservices, and RESTful architectures.
Comprehensive knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps, infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible), and container orchestration technologies.
Strong understanding of data security, encryption, access controls, and regulatory frameworks relevant to global banking.
Track record of innovation, process automation, and driving operational excellence.