Lead Data Engineer

Austinworks is partnering with a series A fintech company (~70 people) building core financial infrastructure for a large, complex industry that still runs on outdated systems. Our platform processes real transactional data and supports business-critical workflows across finance, product, and go-to-market teams. The technical problems are real, the data is messy, and the impact is visible.

This is a company where data correctness matters because it directly touches money.

We’re looking for a senior individual-contributor Lead Data Engineer to own our data platform end-to-end. This is not a people-management role and won’t be for the foreseeable future. You’ll be the technical owner of how data is ingested, modeled, validated, and made usable across the business.

Roughly 70% of the work is internal platform and product data, and ~30% involves customer-facing data workflows, including onboarding, integrations, and reporting tied to financial operations.

If you enjoy building systems from scratch, understanding why they exist, and seeing direct business impact, this role will be a strong fit.

• Own the design and implementation of end-to-end data pipelines from raw ingestion to downstream consumption
• Build and maintain production-grade data infrastructure used by finance, product, marketing, and leadership
• Partner closely with finance on transactional data, reconciliation, and reporting
• Work directly with customers on external data pipelines and integrations tied to onboarding and ongoing usage
• Establish standards around data modeling, quality, testing, and CI/CD
• Act as the technical authority for data architecture and tooling decisions
• Lead projects independently and drive initiatives from 0 → 1

• 6+ years of experience in data engineering or similar senior IC roles
• Hands‑on experience working with financial or transactional data (payments, billing, revenue, ledgers, reconciliation, etc.)
• Clear ownership of 0 → 1 data systems — not just maintaining existing pipelines
• Strong SQL and Python skills
• Experience designing data pipelines used in real production environments
• Ability to clearly articulate why systems were built and the business impact they delivered
• Comfortable working cross‑functionally with finance, product, engineering, and non‑technical stakeholders

• Experience with customer‑facing or external data pipelines
• Dashboards or business‑facing data products
• Experience with Snowflake, AWS, dbt, Airflow/Dagster (tools are flexible)

• Not an ML engineering role
• Not an analytics‑only or dashboard‑only role
• Not a people‑management role
• Not a “maintain what already exists” position