Staff Data Engineer: Core Payments Lakehouse Architect

Payabli; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Stock options

Flexible PTO

Medical, dental, & vision insurance

401K, HSA

Job summary

Payabli is seeking a founding Data Engineer to shape the warehouse and lakehouse strategy, build reliable pipelines, and model trusted data for analytics, ML, and AI initiatives. You’ll own data architecture decisions, enforce security and governance, and drive scalable data infrastructure in a fintech-oriented environment.

You’ll lead the design of canonical datasets, ensure data quality, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to support regulated data requirements and future data platform

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production data systems with ownership of architecture through production.
• Expert SQL and strong Python.
• Deep experience in lakehouse/warehouse ecosystems (e.g. Snowflake/dbt/Fivetran or Databricks/Spark).
• Strong data modeling skills (dimensional, normalized, or Data Vault).
• Experience with pipeline orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and large-scale processing (Spark).
• Production experience on major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including security and cost patterns.
• Experience with sensitive or regulated data—RBAC, encryption, governance, and minimizing blast radius.
• High technical bar through influence; mentor others and lead by example.

Responsibilities

• Architect the platform: define warehouse/lakehouse direction and stand up data lake architecture.
• Build pipelines: batch and streaming data movement (CDC, ELT, real-time).
• Model the data: define canonical datasets and semantic contracts.
• Own reliability and accuracy: data quality, observability, tests, monitoring.
• Build for regulated environments: access controls, masking, auditability.
• Enable AI/ML analytics: feature pipelines and trusted data foundation.
• Set the standard: CI/CD and best practices for data teams.

Skills

SQL proficiency

Python

Data modeling

Data architecture

Cloud platforms

Data pipelines

Observability & testing

Leadership & influence

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Fivetran

Databricks

Spark

Unity Catalog

Job description

Payabli is seeking a founding Data Engineer to shape the warehouse and lakehouse strategy, build reliable pipelines, and model trusted data for analytics, ML, and AI initiatives. You’ll own data architecture decisions, enforce security and governance, and drive scalable data infrastructure in a fintech-oriented environment.

You’ll lead the design of canonical datasets, ensure data quality, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to support regulated data requirements and future data platform