Core Platform Lead (Rust)

I'm working with a well-funded, ~45-person fintech client that's building the intelligent infrastructure layer for private credit, an asset class that today runs almost entirely on spreadsheets, PDFs, and tribal knowledge. Every deal, every filing, every covenant lives in a different format, in a different system. My client is building the platform that turns that chaos into something the whole business can query, trust, and build decisions on top of. Think Bloomberg terminal, but for private credit.They're now hiring a Core Platform Lead to join the data platform team and report directly to the CTO. This isn't a "join the team and pick up tickets" role. You'll be sitting hand in hand with their lead engineer as a true peer and thought partner, someone who challenges the architecture and pushes back on ideas, not someone who just executes on them. The team is intentionally lean right now, and this hire is the person who fills the biggest current gap: nobody on the team has deep experience building out data ingestion from scratch.What the role actually involvesOwning the data ingestion and processing layer that the rest of the business runs on, from raw, messy, heterogeneous financial data through to something clean and queryableMaking first-principles calls on build vs. buy: understanding when a tool like dbt or Airflow genuinely solves the problem, and when the off-the-shelf option falls short of what the business actually needsWorking in Rust at the core of systems where correctness and speed aren't a nice to have, they're the entire point given the financial decisions riding on this dataSolving real data governance problems along the way: data quality, lineage, access controls, and handling of sensitive financial dataHelping shape how the data platform evolves as the company scales, not just maintaining what already existsHaving a genuine voice in engineering culture and process as the team grows around youWhat my client is looking forDeep, real Rust experience. They care about tradeoffs and language fundamentals, not just syntax familiarity, and treat strong Rust ability as a signal of engineering strength more broadlyStrong distributed systems and large-scale backend experienceSomeone who's either built large-scale ingestion pipelines or data infrastructure from scratch before, or is genuinely hungry to. You don't need to have done it at Datadog scale, but that's the kind of background that gets them excitedA communicator who can think deeply but explain concisely. They want someone who can go toe to toe technically without turning every conversation into a lectureProduct curiosity. You don't need to walk in already understanding finance or underwriting, but you do need to want to learn how the people using this system actually use itA healthy, balanced perspective on AI in engineering work. Not a skeptic, not a zealot, just someone who can help the team think clearly about where it actually helpsComp & Location$200k-$250k. NYC hybrid preferred for those local (the CTO likes the team in person occasionally), fully remote is genuinely fine if you're not NYC-based. Open to a fully remote setup for an exceptional candidate regardless of location in the USA.I'm running this search personally, not handing it off, so if this sounds like your kind of problem, drop me a message and I'll walk you through everything else.