Engineering Manager, Data Platform

parafin; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 290,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grant

Work from home flexibility

Unlimited PTO

Commuter benefits

Free lunches

Paid parental leave

401(k)

Employee assistance program

Health insurance

Job summary

Parafin is seeking an engineering manager for the Data Platform who remains hands-on, guiding a 5-6 engineer team across Data Platform, Feature Store/ML, and Underwriting Platform. You will set technical direction, review designs, and drive architecture for high-leverage improvements used by 60+ partners.

The role emphasizes leadership with technical depth, collaboration with data science and product teams, and delivering reliable, scalable systems in a fintech context.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with 2+ years in leadership or management.
• Deep experience in data infrastructure and ML platforms.
• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration abilities.

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a team of 5-6 engineers across three areas: Data Platform, Feature Store/ML, Underwriting Platform.
• Set execution strategy and drive technical direction for the team.
• Review designs and code, unblock high-priority problems, and own architecture decisions.
• Own reliability and on-call processes, with scalable incident response.
• Partner with data science, product, and risk teams to align roadmap.
• Represent the team's roadmap to stakeholders and balance data infra, ML, and underwriting needs.

Skills

Team leadership

Data infrastructure

ML platform

Code review & architecture

Tools

Databricks

Spark

Airflow

AWS

Job description

About Us:

At Parafin, we're on a mission to grow small businesses.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, but traditional banks often don't have their backs. We build tech that makes it simple for small businesses to access the financial tools they need through the platforms they already sell on.

We partner with companies like DoorDash, Amazon, Worldpay, and Mindbody to offer fast and flexible funding, spend management, and savings tools to their small business users via a simple integration. Parafin takes on all the complexity of capital markets, underwriting, servicing, compliance, and customer service for our partners.

We're a tight-knit team of innovators hailing from Stripe, Square, Plaid, Coinbase, Robinhood, CERN, and more - all united by a passion for building tools that help small businesses succeed. Parafin is backed by prominent venture capitalists including GIC, Notable Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Thrive Capital. Parafin is a Series C company, and we have raised more than $194M in equity and $340M in debt facilities.

Join us in creating a future where every small business has the financial tools they need.

About the Position:

The Data Platform team owns the systems that generate every capital product offer at Parafin, powering both batch and real-time underwriting across all of our partners and products.

We're looking for an engineering manager who is still deeply technical, closer to a tech lead manager. You'll set technical direction for the team, and manage and grow a team of 5-6 engineers across three tightly coupled areas: Data Platform (warehouse, ingestion, Airflow/Databricks infra), Feature Store & ML Platform (feature materialization, model training/serving lifecycle), and Underwriting Platform (batch and real-time pipelines that generate offers).

This is a high-leverage role: every improvement to platform reliability or iteration speed compounds across 60+ partners and every product line. You'll also be a primary technical partner to Underwriting Data Science that owns model research, risk analysis, and new product development, as well as to product engineering teams that build features on top of the data and underwriting systems this team owns.

What You'll Do:

• Manage and grow a team of 5-6 engineers spanning Data storage and schema, Feature Store/ML Platform, and Underwriting Platform, including hiring, mentorship, and career development.

• Set and drive execution and technical strategy for the team's three areas: warehouse/data infrastructure (Databricks, Airflow, dbt), the feature store and ML dev lifecycle (feature materialization, training, batch/real-time inference, model registry), and underwriting pipelines

• Stay hands-on: review designs and code, unblock the team on hard technical problems, and personally drive architecture on the highest-priority initiatives.

• Own reliability and on-call for the team’s systems; build sustainable processes around incident response, SLAs, and recoverability

• Partner closely with underwriting data science, and product engineering teams that build on top of the data platform

• Represent the team's roadmap and tradeoffs to cross-functional stakeholders (DS, Merchant Decisioning, Product, Risk) and prioritize across data infra, ML platform, and underwriting pipeline needs.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership or engineering management role, ideally in data infrastructure, ML platform, or a similar backend/data domain.

• Ability to stay close to the team’s execution, review/discuss technical designs and trade-offs

• Strong understanding of modern data/lakehouse stacks: Spark/PySpark, Databricks, Airflow, and cloud infra (AWS).

• Experience with ML infrastructure concepts: feature stores, model training/serving pipelines, model registries, batch and real-time inference.

• Track record of managing engineers with empathy, giving direct feedback, and building a healthy, high-ownership team culture.

• Experience building strong teams by hiring to a high technical bar and actively growing engineers' careers.

• Experience navigating ambiguity and competing priorities across multiple technical domains and stakeholders; strong judgment around reliability and operational rigor

• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable representing technical tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Databricks tech ecosystem

• Experience at startups

• Experience in the fintech domain

What We Offer:

• Salary Range: $290k - $330k

• Equity grant

• Medical, dental & vision insurance

• Work from home flexibility

• Unlimited PTO

• Commuter benefits

• Free lunches

• Paid parental leave

• 401(k)

• Employee assistance program

If you require reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please contact us.