Data Engineering Lead

Data Engineering Lead

9fin is the AI platform powering global debt markets — the world's largest asset class at over $145 trillion.

Debt markets are vast, global, and mission-critical, yet still run on fragmented data, PDFs, and manual workflows. 9fin replaces this broken infrastructure with a single platform that centralises proprietary credit data, deep analysis, and high-value workflows across global markets.

Today, 9fin powers teams at 300+ blue-chip institutions worldwide, including global banks, asset managers, private equity firms, law firms, and advisors. The business is scaling at exceptional speed, with rapid expansion in the US and best-in-class retention driven by deep workflow adoption.

We're at a defining inflection point. With proven product-market fit and strong, global market pull, 9fin is accelerating toward becoming the category-defining platform for debt markets worldwide.

What You'll Work On

As our Data Engineering Lead, you will turn data engineering into a reliable, scalable product capability; one that enables faster product delivery, trusted decision-making, and customer-facing data products without heroics.

You'll be a hands-on player/coach: setting technical direction, raising standards, and shipping meaningful platform improvements yourself.

• Own the data engineering operating model: Define how ingestion, orchestration, warehouse foundations, and customer delivery pipelines are built and run across the company. Set clear standards, ownership boundaries, and decision rights so teams can move faster with less ambiguity.
• Own the roadmap for platform reliability, scale, and cost: Prioritise and deliver the highest-leverage work across reliability, observability, developer experience, and cost efficiency.
• Industrialise customer-facing data delivery: Partner with Product and Engineering to deliver APIs and feeds with clear schema contracts, rollout/versioning discipline, and SLA-driven operations. Treat data trust as a product feature.
• Raise engineering quality through systems: Introduce reusable patterns, CI/CD guardrails, runbooks, and incident playbooks that reduce variability and toil.
• Build platform leverage for the wider data organisation: Enable Analytics Engineering and Analytics teams to spend more time on metrics, models, and insights by reducing platform friction, instability, and one-off workarounds.
• Lead and grow data engineering talent: Line-manage and mentor engineers, improve technical judgment across the team, and create a culture of ownership, pragmatism, and operational excellence.

What Success Looks Like

In your first 12 months, you will be expected to:

• Improve platform reliability and incident response maturity (clear SLOs/SLAs, faster detection and resolution, lower recurring failure rates).
• Reduce time and effort required to onboard new data sources through standardised ingestion and orchestration patterns.
• Establish clear ownership and decision boundaries between Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and adjacent teams.
• Improve confidence in data quality through stronger contracts, validation, freshness controls, and observability.
• Deliver measurable progress on customer-facing data products (feeds/APIs) with stable, trusted delivery.
• Reduce key-person dependency by raising team capability, review quality, and shared operational knowledge.
• Create a clear, adopted technical roadmap for data engineering aligned to business priorities and product outcomes.

About You

We're looking for a high-agency, hands-on Data Engineering Lead who can combine technical depth with influence: someone who can improve systems, raise standards, and align multiple teams around a better way of working.

• Proven ownership of production data platforms end-to-end , including ingestion, orchestration, warehouse foundations, and operational reliability.
• Strong technical leadership without stepping away from the code ; able to design, build, and coach in equal measure.
• A track record of converting platform work into business impact ; faster delivery, lower cost, improved reliability, better customer outcomes.
• Experience building and enforcing engineering standards via templates, CI/CD, testing strategy, and operational guardrails.
• Strong judgment under ambiguity ; can sequence work by leverage and risk, and make pragmatic trade-offs at startup pace.
• Deep Python/SQL and modern data platform experience , including orchestration and ingestion tooling in real production environments.
• Cloud and infrastructure fluency (ideally across AWS and GCP) and practical IaC experience.
• Operational excellence mindset , including incident response, runbooks, observability, and continuous reliability improvement.
• Excellent stakeholder communication and influence , especially with Product, Engineering, and analytics consumers.

Nice to have:

• Experience with customer-consumable data products (APIs, feeds, data share) in B2B SaaS or data product environments.
• Experience operating in regulated or high-trust data contexts.
• Experience scaling data platform teams from early-stage to growth-stage maturity.

Financial & Insurance

• Competitive salary (our salary bands are benchmarked at the top end of the market)
• Equity options
• Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%)
• Private medical insurance
• Paid sick leave with income protection for long periods of illness
• Group life assurance
• Season ticket loan & cycle to work schemes

Time Off

• 25 holiday days per year
• Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days)
• Hybrid working model, to allow you the flexibility to decide how, where and when you do your best work
• Work abroad for up to 3 months a year
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service
• Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available

Training & Culture

• Professional learning and development budget
• Quarterly team socials
• Summer and winter company social events

A Note from the Hiring Manager

At 9fin, data isn't just a support function; it's at the core of our product. You'll be surrounded by smart, curious people who are passionate about using data to make better decisions, improve our product, and create meaningful impact. If you're looking for autonomy to own high-impact initiatives from conception through to delivery, and the opportunity to influence the entire organisation, then 9fin might be the perfect fit for you. I'd love to hear from you, apply now to learn more! – Rory, Analytics Engineering Manager

9fin is an equal opportunities employer

At 9fin we are dedicated to building and promoting a fair and inclusive workplace where everyone can reach their full potential and truly belong. We recognize that building diverse teams enables a more creative and productive environment. If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be who we're looking for — either for this role, or perhaps another.