Data Engineering Manager

Self Financial, Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 170,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company equity

Performance-based bonuses

Health, vision and dental insurance

Flexible vacation policy

Educational assistance

Free gym membership

Casual dress code

Team building events and activities

Remote work arrangements/ flexible 工作

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Self Financial, Inc. is seeking a Data Engineering Manager for the Data Platform team to own the health, reliability, and roadmap of core data pipelines and platform services.

You'll manage a team of data engineers, perform architecture reviews, pair on hard problems, and guide tooling choices while ensuring data quality and governance across risk, analytics, and reporting functions.

The role balances hands-on technical leadership with people management in a fast-growing fintech environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in data engineering management or tech-lead-manager roles.
• 7+ years hands-on data engineering experience building pipelines and warehouses.
• Experience with modern data stack: cloud warehouse (Redshift/Snowflake/BigQuery), dbt, and orchestration tools.
• Strong communication skills with non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in agile engineering environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a data engineers team, including hiring and performance.
• Own architecture decisions for data warehouse and transformation pipelines.
• Lead design reviews and code/PR reviews with the team.
• Drive modernization toward lakehouse and Iceberg/Spark.
• Collaborate with Analytics, Risk, and Infra teams to align platform with business needs.
• Establish data governance and quality checks.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

dbt

Airflow

Kafka

Data lakehouse

Data governance

Tools

Redshift

Snowflake

BigQuery

Iceberg

Dagster

Job description

Self Financial is a venture-backed, high-growth FinTech company with a mission to increase economic inclusion and financial resilience by empowering people to build credit and build savings.

We're looking for people who share our passion and are driven to tackle challenges, find solutions and make the financial space better for the communities we serve.

Our team is passionate about challenging the status quo of the credit industry by providing people accessible tools to take control of their credit. Executing on our mission requires deep collaboration across our teams to ensure our products reach the people who can benefit from them the most, particularly the 100 million+ Americans who have no or low credit.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To that end, we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.

As a Data Engineering Manager on our Data Platform team, you will lead a small, high-leverage team responsible for the infrastructure and pipelines that power credit decisioning, risk, analytics, and financial reporting across Self Financial. You'll stay hands-on with the architecture reviewing designs, unblocking hard technical problems, and setting direction on our data warehouse, transformation layer, and orchestration while managing and growing a team of data engineers. This is a working technical manager role, not a generalist engineering management role: we need someone who has actually built and operated modern data platforms, not just managed teams that did.

Teams that make a difference; individuals that matter

At Self Financial, we put hard problems in the hands of people who've solved them before. Our data platform underpins everything from real-time risk signals to executive reporting, and it's undergoing active modernization including a multi-quarter migration toward a lakehouse architecture. We want a leader who can go deep in design reviews, not just in headcount planning. This role presents an incredible opportunity for you to have a before and after transformation of an enterprise data warehouse in your career.

About the Job

As Data Engineering Manager, you will own the health, reliability, and roadmap of our core data pipelines and platform services, while directly managing a team of data engineers. You'll split your time between hands-on technical leadership architecture reviews, pairing with engineers on hard problems, evaluating tooling and infrastructure choices and traditional people management: hiring, mentoring, performance, and process. You'll partner closely with Analytics, Risk, and Platform/Infrastructure teams to make sure the data platform serves real business decisions, not just dashboards.

Who you are

• You've been a practitioner in modern data infrastructure you've designed, built, or operated warehouse/lakehouse systems, not just directed others who did
• You can read and critique a dbt model, a pipeline DAG, or a schema design and have an informed opinion
• You're comfortable being a contributor in a data platform design conversation
• You want to manage people, but you don't want to lose your technical edge doing it
• You care about data quality, governance, and reliability as much as throughput.
• You like the idea of helping people build (or rebuild) their financial future through the data that powers it

What you'll be doing

• Managing and growing a team of data engineers, including hiring, mentoring, and performance management
• Owning architecture and design decisions for our data warehouse, transformation pipelines (dbt), and orchestration layer
• Actively participating in technical design reviews and code/PR reviews
• Driving our modernization roadmap, including our migration to Iceberg/Spark and to build a warehouse in medallion-tier architecture.
• Partnering with Analytics, Risk, and Infrastructure teams to translate business and reporting needs into platform capabilities
• Establishing and enforcing data platform governance: model maturity standards, access controls, data quality checks
• Evaluating and introducing new tooling, frameworks, and infrastructure as the platform scales

What you'll have

• 4+ years in a data engineering management or tech-lead-manager role, directly managing engineers
• 7+ years of hands-on data engineering experience - building and operating pipelines, warehouses, or lakehouse platforms in production
• Specific experience with a modern data stack: a cloud data warehouse (e.g., Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery), a transformation framework (e.g., dbt), and an orchestration tool (e.g., Airflow, Dagster)
• Working knowledge of streaming/event pipelines (e.g., Kafka) and lakehouse table formats (e.g., Iceberg, Delta Lake) is strongly preferred
• A track record of making architecture decisions that held up in production, not just process improvements
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including with non-technical stakeholders
• Experience with agile engineering methodologies

Base salary range: $170,000-225,000 annually. Individual pay and level is based on factors unique to each candidate, including skill set, experience, and other job-related reasons.

Benefits and Perks

We have the compensation and benefits you expect. But there's one thing that Self Financial can offer that many companies cannot: we can positively change the world, while making a profit. We are a team of Builders, empowering our customers to build their dreams. We have a Do the Right Thing ethos in all that we do, and we hope you value that approach, too.

Our perks include:

• Company equity in the form of Stock Options
• Performance-based bonuses
• Generous employer-paid health, vision and dental insurance coverage
• Flexible vacation policy
• Educational assistance
• Free gym membership
• Casual dress code
• Team building events and activities
• Remote work arrangements/ flexible work schedule
• Paid parental leave

Self Financial requires all employees hired to successfully pass a background check.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

At this time, we are only able to consider applicants who are U.S. Citizens or Green Card Holders for employment opportunities. We appreciate your understanding.