Senior Data Engineer

About Tala Tala is the AI-native credit infrastructure that connects global capital to the global majority. We combine proprietary risk intelligence with an expanding network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale. To date, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion in capital to more than 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, building the definitive contextual dataset on thin-file borrowers in emerging markets. Tala is now converting that foundation into d infrastructure that partners, capital providers, and ecosystems can build on. The company has been named to the Fortune Impact 20 list, CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies twice, CNBC Disruptor 50 for five years, and Forbes’ Fintech 50 list for ten years running. Given the global nature of our team, we operate on a remote-first approach with office hubs in Santa Monica, CA (HQ); Nairobi, Kenya; Mexico City, Mexico; Manila, the Philippines; and Bangalore, India. Most Talazens join us because they connect with our mission. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Tala, we’d love to hear from you! The Role We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help build, operate, and continuously improve the data infrastructure that powers analytics and business intelligence across Tala's global markets. In this individual contributor role, you will take ownership of Tala's data synchronization pipelines, ensuring that data from our market-level databases is reliably captured, processed, and delivered to Snowflake for downstream analytics and business use. Our data infrastructure uses a modern AWS-based architecture, including AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3, and Snowflake. You will work across this ecosystem to ensure data is accurate, available, and delivered with minimal latency.

Beyond maintaining existing pipelines, you will identify opportunities to improve performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. You will also establish and monitor service level objectives (SLOs), strengthen testing and deployment practices, and lead root cause analysis when issues arise. This is an opportunity for a hands-on engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed data challenges and takes ownership of production systems from development through operation. What You'll Do - Own and operate data pipelines: Maintain and improve Tala's change data capture (CDC) and data synchronization infrastructure, ensuring accurate and timely delivery of data from market-level databases into Snowflake. - Improve pipeline performance and scalability: Identify and implement improvements to reduce latency, optimize infrastructure costs, and support growing data volumes across markets. - Build and evolve data infrastructure: Onboard new data sources, tables, and markets while managing schema evolution and ensuring compatibility across systems. - Drive reliability and data quality: Establish service level objectives (SLOs), implement monitoring and alerting, and build automated data quality checks to ensure data remains accurate and available. - Strengthen engineering practices: Develop and maintain unit and integration tests, CI/CD workflows, infrastructure-as-code, and safe deployment strategies, including dry runs and blue-green deployments. - Lead incident resolution: Troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analyses, and translate lessons learned into better monitoring, testing, documentation, and operational runbooks. - Contribute to technical direction: Participate in architecture and design discussions, write and review technical design documents, and provide thoughtful feedback through code reviews. - Collaborate across teams: Partner with Data Science, Analytics, Data Platform, Product, Credit, and Business Development teams to understand their data needs and ensure reliable access to the information they depend on.