About the Role
Payabli is looking for a founding Data Engineer to lead the architecture and implementation of our data systems. You will make foundational decisions regarding warehouse and lakehouse strategy, data modeling, and the secure handling of sensitive financial information. This role serves as the technical backbone for our analytics, ML, and AI initiatives, focusing on building high-quality, scalable, and trustworthy data foundations from the ground up.
What You'll Do
- Architect the platform, including the data lake and layered architecture that turns raw data into intelligence-ready assets.
- Design and operate batch and streaming pipelines, including CDC and ELT processes, to move data reliably from production systems.
- Define canonical datasets and models to ensure semantic consistency across the organization.
- Own data reliability by implementing observability, integrity checks, and testing frameworks.
- Design for a regulated environment with a focus on role-based access, data lineage, masking, and auditability.
- Enable AI/ML and analytics workloads by building trustworthy feature pipelines.
- Set the engineering standard by establishing best practices, tooling, and CI/CD for the data team.
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of experience building production data systems with a history of owning large-scale architectural decisions.
- Expertise in SQL and strong proficiency in Python.
- Deep experience with modern lakehouse/warehouse ecosystems (e.g., Snowflake/dbt/Fivetran or Databricks/Spark/Delta Lake).
- Strong data modeling skills including dimensional, normalized, or Data Vault approaches.
- Experience with pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and large-scale data processing (Spark).
- Production experience on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with focus on security and cost optimization.
- Experience working with sensitive/regulated data, including governance, encryption, and access controls.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction and mentor other engineers through example and design reviews.