Senior Data Engineer

Cari Network; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) matching

Remote-first policy

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payments system and seeks a senior data engineer to own ingestion pipelines from transactional sources into the analytics platform.

You will collaborate on governance, data residency, and platform choices (AWS, Snowflake, Databricks), enforce a strictly derived analytics layer, and mentor junior engineers while shaping production-ready data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of data engineering experience with hands-on pipeline design.
• Experience comparing AWS-native tooling, Snowflake, and Databricks with governance focus.
• Experience building data governance: access controls, audit logging, data lineage.
• Production experience with streaming or event-driven pipelines (Kafka/MSK).
• Strong written communication and ability to write design docs.

Responsibilities

• Own ingestion pipeline design from transactional/infrastructure into analytics platform.
• Contribute input to platform evaluation (AWS, Snowflake, Databricks) with governance focus.
• Define data governance practices: access controls, audit logging, lineage.
• Enforce boundary that analytics is derived from source of truth.
• Define data quality and reconciliation practices for downstream consumers.
• Write RFCs and design docs for ingestion and governance decisions.
• Define production-ready standards: monitoring, alerting, recovery.
• Mentor less-senior data engineers.

Skills

Data engineering

Communication

Mentoring

Tools

Kafka/MSK

PostgreSQL

Snowflake

Databricks

Terraform

AWS

Job description

About the Role

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we’re creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network—banks, digital asset exchanges, and, most importantly, the customers they serve.

What You’ll Do

Own the ingestion pipeline design from our transactional and event infrastructure (PostgreSQL, Kafka/MSK) into the analytical platform, with a clear boundary around what's replicated, transformed, or derived

Contribute deep technical input to the analytical platform evaluation — AWS-native tooling vs. Snowflake vs. Databricks — particularly on governance, compliance, and data residency tradeoffs

Build the data governance practices for your domain: access controls, audit logging, and data lineage that satisfy bank-partner and regulatory evidentiary requirements

Enforce the boundary that keeps the analytical layer strictly derived from our transactional Postgres source of truth — this system should never become a shadow source of truth or a path back into live transaction processing

Define data quality and reconciliation practices so downstream consumers — compliance reporting, dashboards, future analytics — can trust what they're querying

Write RFCs and design docs for ingestion and governance decisions that other engineers, including ones outside the data function, can act on

Define what "production-ready" means for the data pipelines you own: monitoring, alerting, and failure recovery

Mentor less-senior data engineers as the function grows beyond its first hire

Qualifications

5–7 years of data engineering experience, including hands‑on pipeline design work, not just operating within a platform someone else built

Working knowledge of the tradeoffs between AWS‑native data tooling, Snowflake, and Databricks, particularly around governance and compliance rather than pure performance

Experience building data governance practices—access control, audit logging, data lineage—ideally in a regulated or compliance‑sensitive environment (fintech, healthcare, or similar)

Solid understanding of keeping an analytical layer strictly derived from a transactional source of truth, and the failure modes when that boundary erodes

Production experience with data pipeline and ingestion tooling from streaming or event‑driven sources (Kafka/MSK or equivalent) and transactional databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent)

Strong written communication—comfortable writing design docs that stakeholders outside the data function rely on

Comfortable owning a domain independently while operating in a still‑forming function without an established playbook

Nice to Haves

Prior experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment where data governance carried contractual or regulatory weight

Familiarity with blockchain or on‑chain data (transaction history, event logs) as an analytical data source

Experience with SOC 2, data residency, or similar compliance frameworks from the data platform side

Familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code tooling (Terraform or equivalent) for provisioning data infrastructure

Experience mentoring engineers into data platform roles

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation: salary, bonus, and equity
• 401(k) with matching program
• Flexible vacation policy (PTO) and remote‑first work environment