Position Overview

At PNC, our people are our greatest differentiator and competitive advantage in the markets we serve. We are all united in delivering the best experience for our customers. We work together each day to foster an inclusive workplace culture where all of our employees feel respected, valued and have an opportunity to contribute to the company’s success. As a Senior Data Engineer within PNC's Lending Tech organization, you will be based in Miamisburg, OH, Pittsburgh, PA, Dallas, TX, Birmingham, AL, or Strongsville, OH.

We are building and operating an enterprise-scale, high-volume transactional database that supports all lending payment transactions end-to-end. This role designs, builds, and maintains highly available, performant, and secure data stores and data movement patterns across MySQL and Oracle platforms, partnering closely with application engineering, SRE/operations, and security teams.

You will be accountable for database architecture and implementation decisions that directly impact transaction integrity, latency, resiliency, and operational excellence. Level (Senior vs Lead) is determined by depth of scope and leadership impact (see Level differentiation).

What you’ll do (core responsibilities)
Architecture & Design
• Design and evolve an enterprise transactional data model for lending payment processing (OLTP), including schemas, constraints, indexing strategies, partitioning, and retention/archival patterns.
• Define database standards for reliability, scalability, performance, and resiliency across MySQL and Oracle.

Build & Operate (Production Ownership)
• Implement and operate high availability and disaster recovery patterns; validate operational readiness (failover/failback, replication health, recovery objectives).
• Drive performance engineering: query tuning, index strategy, execution plan analysis, contention/locking analysis, and workload management.
• Implement automation for database operations (provisioning support, patch readiness support, backup validation, health checks, and runbook-driven execution).

Data Movement & Replication
• Design and support replication/data movement strategies as needed for resiliency and/or cross-site requirements (preferred Oracle skills include Golden Gate and Data Guard).

Security & Compliance
• Partner with security to enforce encryption-in-transit/at-rest, least privilege, auditing, secrets management integration, and vulnerability remediation for database platforms.

Cross-team Collaboration
• Work closely with application teams on schema evolution, release coordination, and safe migration approaches (including MySQL ↔ Oracle considerations).
• Produce durable documentation: architecture diagrams, decision records, runbooks, and operational validation checklists.

Required qualifications
• Strong hands-on experience designing and operating high-volume, enterprise OLTP databases supporting mission-critical transactions.
• Advanced SQL and performance tuning experience across MySQL and Oracle (query tuning, indexing, partitioning, execution plan analysis).
• Experience with operational best practices: backup/restore validation, patch planning, monitoring/alerting, incident response, and runbooks.
• Proven ability to collaborate across engineering, operations, and security with clear, structured communication.

Preferred qualifications (Oracle focus)
• Oracle Exadata experience (engineering/tuning/operations on Exadata platforms).
• Oracle Data Guard experience (HA/DR, role transitions, validation of primary/standby states).
• Oracle Golden Gate experience (replication design/operations).
• Understanding of enterprise MySQL deployment/replication patterns (e.g., primary/replica cross-site patterns).

Level differentiation
Senior Database Engineer
• Owns significant components of the database platform (specific schemas/domains, key performance areas, or HA/DR operational ownership) with minimal guidance.
• Leads technical workstreams (e.g., partitioning rollout, performance remediation, operational readiness) and drives them to closure.
• Improves runbooks/automation; contributes to production incident response and prevention.

Lead Database Engineer
• Owns end-to-end database architecture for the platform or a major program (e.g., enterprise transaction store modernization, MySQL→Oracle strategy, multi-site replication/DR patterns).
• Sets standards and is an escalation point for complex performance and replication/DR tradeoffs.
• Mentors engineers/DBAs, drives cross-team ali