Staff Data Engineer

Founding Data Engineer for the Data Engineering team at Payabli. You will make foundational, one‑way‑door decisions that define how we model, move, and trust payments data for years to come. This role will shape our data architecture that supports analytics, ML, and AI ambitions. What You’ll Do: Architect the platform; set our warehouse/lakehouse direction and stand up the data lake and layered architecture that turns our raw system of record into trustworthy, queryable, intelligence‑ready data. Build the pipelines; design and run batch and streaming pipelines that move data reliably out of our production systems – CDC, ELT, and real‑time where it matters. Model the data; define the canonical datasets and models the whole company depends on, getting the grain, semantics, and contracts right. Own reliability and accuracy; as this is financial data, correctness is non‑negotiable. Own data quality, observability, integrity checks, and testing/monitoring to ensure trust. Build for a regulated environment; design role‑based access, masking, lineage, and auditability from day one, and keep sensitive financial data in appropriate silos. Enable AI/ML and analytics; build feature pipelines and trustworthy data foundation for intelligence work, moving from systems of record toward systems of intelligence and action. Set the standard; establish practices, tooling, and CI/CD for data that the future team inherits. What We’re Looking For: 8+ years building production data systems, owning architecture and delivering big decisions to production. Expert SQL and strong Python skills. Deep experience in at least one modern lakehouse/warehouse ecosystem (Snowflake with dbt/Fivetran, or Databricks with Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog). Depth and first‑principles reasoning across stacks. Strong data modeling skills—dimensional, normalized, or Data Vault—and a sense for designing models that age well. Experience with pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or equivalent) and large‑scale processing (such as Spark). Production experience on a major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including security and cost patterns. Experience working with sensitive or regulated data—access controls, encryption, governance, and keeping blast radius small. A high technical bar set through influence and example. Comfortable in codebase and design reviews. Nice to Haves: Payments, fintech, or other regulated‑domain experience, including familiarity with PCI DSS and tokenization/vaulting patterns. Streaming infrastructure (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink). Data governance, lineage, and observability tooling (Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon, Monte Carlo, Great Expectations, OpenLineage). Experience supporting ML/AI workloads—feature stores, training/inference pipelines, MLflow. An interest in growing into people leadership as the function scales. What we can offer you: Competitive salary Stock options with the potential to unlock more equity as we grow Flexible PTO and paid parental leave Medical, dental, & vision insurance 401K, HSA, pre‑tax savings programs Payabli is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse, inclusive workplace. #J-18808-Ljbffr