Data Engineer Remote Contract Jobs in Columbia, SC

Job Posting End Date: August 15

When you join the team at Unum, you become part of an organization committed to helping you thrive.

Here, we work to provide the employee benefits and service solutions that enable employees at our client companies to thrive throughout life's moments. And this starts with ensuring that every one of our team members enjoys opportunities to succeed both professionally and personally. To enable this, we provide:

• Award-winning culture

• Inclusion and diversity as a priority

• Performance Based Incentive Plans

• Competitive benefits package that includes: Health, Vision, Dental, Short & Long-Term Disability

• Generous PTO (including paid time to volunteer!)

• Up to 9.5% 401(k) employer contribution

• Mental health support

• Career advancement opportunities

• Student loan repayment options

• Tuition reimbursement

• Flexible work environments

*All the benefits listed above are subject to the terms of their individual Plans.

And that's just the beginning...

With 10,000 employees helping more than 39 million people worldwide, every role at Unum is meaningful and impacts the lives of our customers. Whether you're directly supporting a growing family, or developing online tools to help navigate a difficult loss, customers are counting on the combined talents of our entire team. Help us help others, and join Team Unum today!

General Summary:We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to join the CX Analytics team within our Customer Experience Organization. In this role, you will design, build, and maintain data solutions that enable BI/reporting and advanced analytics across the team, ensuring data is accessible, reliable, and structured for meaningful use across our team. You will own specific data domains and pipelines end-to-end, develop and optimize data models, and integrate new data sources across the ecosystem, including both structured and unstructured data. A core expectation of the role is building and supporting AI-enabled pipelines and LLM-based workflows that extract signal from sources such as raw text, alongside broader automation that scales how the team delivers analytics.
As a hands-on builder, you will spend your time close to the work-writing code, developing pipelines, and solving technical problems daily-while helping shape standards and best practices for data engineering as the team grows. You will mentor other engineers and partner closely with BI Analysts and Data Scientists to support their work, ensuring environments, pipelines, and datasets are built with quality, scalability, and usability in mind. The ideal candidate is a strong problem solver and collaborator who can work across technologies and data domains, take ownership of complex work, and consistently deliver data solutions that support better decision-making across the organization.
This is a campus-based role. Current remote and field-based Unum employees may apply and will be considered in accordance with company policy.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Employ a variety of languages and tools to lead the development, construction, testing and maintenance of complex data pipelines, ensuring they support the requirements of the business.

• Efficiently integrate large volume of data from different sources (including DB2, SQL Server, Web API and Teradata).

• Apply validation, aggregation, and reconciliation techniques to create a rich data framework.

• Work closely with the data scientists and business partners to understand the business problem they are trying to solve and the analytics solutions they plan to apply. Use this understanding to create appropriate data structures tailored for the specific problem.

• Define scalability, extensibility, performance and maintainability requirements for the problem at hand and create data pipelines meeting requirements. Promote and lead development of solutions following appropriate engineering process that is fit to purpose for different use scenarios.

• Gain a deep understanding of and drive the evolution of the enterprise data architecture including the application of current and emerging data frameworks and tools (eg hosting data in Cloud).

• Efficiently prepares results for interpretation and/or visualization and communicates findings and potential value to influence manager, leadership, and business partner decision making.

• Play a lead role in integration of solutions within existing business processes using automation techniques.

• Gain a deep understanding of theory and application of current and emerging software engineering practices.

• Provides support, training and/or mentorship to lower level Data Engineer peers.

• Perform other related duties as assigned

Job Specifications

• Bachelor's degree in quantitative field is required, Master's or PhD in a quantitative field is preferred

• 6 years of professional experience or equivalent relevant work experience preferred

• Core Data Engineer Capabilities: Deep expertise in at least two of the following, with basic capabilities in all others:

• Software Engineering: Expertise in at least one relevant object-oriented programing language (i.e. Java/Scala, Python). Experience in DevOps best practice including CI/CD, process automation and optimization.

• Data Architecture and Infrastructure: Good understanding of data architecture principles and related infrastructure requirements, covering on-prem and Cloud platforms.

• Holistic Data Preparation: The ability to understand and present data in the appropriate context, including a good understanding how the data will build towards a business solution.

• Data Extraction, Transform & Load: Preferred skills include: Expertise in writing complex SQL queries that join multiple tables/databases. Independently explore databases/tables or other legacy data content to identify best data sources to solve business problems. Demonstrates ability to troubleshoot complex SQL queries with little guidance. Demonstrates ability to create logical data models by combining data from multiple sources including internal and external data

• Core business capabilities: Demonstrated communication skills, strong experience in financial services, leadership experience working with senior management and executive leadership, and attention to detail while effectively and independently prioritizing work and managing multiple projects simultaneously. Provides guidance and direction on projects to less experienced staff. Strong ability to understand and explain a problem and identify and communicate an appropriate solution.

• Leadership Capabilities: Actively coaches and mentors peers and team members, especially within areas of expertise. Responds quickly and positively to change and is viewed as a promoter of change management. Provides technical leadership and direction for data science initiatives, ensuring output conforms to agreed upon quality attributes

• Preferred characteristics: Entrepreneurial self-starter. A thorough, results-oriented problem-solver, and a lifelong learner with voracious curiosity. Demonstrated expertise in their organization. Ability to conduct independent research and development for use internally and externally

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Unum and Colonial Life are part of Unum Group, a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of employee benefits to companies worldwide. Headquartered in Chattanooga, TN, with international offices in Ireland, Poland and the UK, Unum also has significant operations in Portland, ME, and Baton Rouge, LA - plus over 35 US field offices. Colonial Life is headquartered in Columbia, SC, with over 40 field offices nationwide.

Unum is an equal opportunity employer, considering all qualified applicants and employees for hiring, placement, and advancement, without regard to a person's race, color, religion, national origin, age, genetic information, military status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, or protected veteran status.

The base salary range for applicants for this position is listed below. Unless actual salary is indicated above in the job description, actual pay will be based on skill, geographical location and experience.

$89,400.00-$183,500.00

Additionally, Unum offers a portfolio of benefits and rewards that are competitive and comprehensive including healthcare benefits (health, vision, dental), insurance benefits (short & long-term disability), performance-based incentive plans, paid time off, and a 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match up to 5% and an additional 4.5% contribution whether you contribute to the plan or not. All benefits are subject to the terms and conditions of individual Plans.

Company:

Unum