Sr. Director, Data Engineering - Paze

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose 

The Sr. Director, Data Engineering is part of the Paze Engineering group within the Technology organization. This role leads the technical team that will build and support the analytics data environment used by the Paze Product to support their business goals for Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, Data Science, and Analytics. Working with stakeholders, technology partners, and enterprise architecture, determine the strategy for the platform. Provide updates to executives and stakeholders on the progress and performance of the platform and future plans. This role will be a peer to the Product Engineering team that owns the software engineering components and services. This role will report to the Head of Technology, Paze on the Chief Technology Officer team. 

Essential Functions 

• Lead, grow and inspire an innovative yet process-driven technical data organization ensuring they are successfully executing projects driven by stakeholder requirements. 

• Provide transparency, accountability, and ownership to members within the team to inspire long term team growth and improved outcomes. 

• Effectively partner with a variety of cross-functional teams to determine the capability requirements for a scalable business intelligence, data science and analytics foundational infrastructure including data processing and storage. 

• Research and document non-business technical requirements for the platform to ensure the longevity of the system designs, optimize for current and future internal technical capabilities, account for industry evolution and best practices, and alignment with enterprise vision and roadmap. 

• Establish and communicate data pipeline procedures including data formatting and ETL by stages; retention, expiration, and governance as dictated by business controls; data ingest best practices based on processing need (e.g. graph, in-memory, Parquet, time series, etc.); and optimize data model performance (such as graph + time series). 

• Articulate the vision, roadmap and technical designs including proposed vendors, technologies, and technical processes to support those capability and technical requirements. Effectively brief executives and other stakeholders, accepting input and adjusting accordingly. 

• Align with peers who own the other parts of the Product and Technology to ensure reliable data movement, optimum platform integration, and coordination of data and technical planned updates. 

• Translate the roadmap into projects with discrete milestones and reliable estimates on an annual basis. 

• Deliver on those projects to build and extend in the future the highest quality platform that meets reliability, scalability, data governance, securability, auditability, (and other -ilities) requirements with financial oversight and proven ROI. 

• Establish operational controls for uptime and business SLAs including observability metrics for proactive platform health monitoring; and appropriate support/on-call procedures for supporting constituencies. 

• Establish and maintain industry standard best practices and processes through all phases of the development lifecycle. 

• Lead or collaborate on end-to-end engagements with external vendors and partners including selection and ongoing relationship management to ensure we are getting high value out of our technology investments 

• Support the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data. Ensure inclusion of strong data governance, risk, security, and data quality controls. 

• Build Data SME and center of excellence for Data functions for the product to rely on for future initiatives.  

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through completion of a bachelor’s degree in a STEM or related field. 

• 15+ years’ experience in Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, Data Architecture, or similar functions, with progressively increasing responsibility.  

• 10+ years of experience building and leading high performing technical data platform teams (including ETL, pipelines, and storage) providing critical business capabilities supporting analytics team. 

• 5+ years of experience building and directly managing high performing data teams. 

• Demonstrated experience in setting and delivering on a large-scale data or analytics-related technical strategy, developing requirements and roadmap while meeting budget and timeline targets. 

• Hands-on experience building scalable data platforms to meet business analysis and data science requirements. 

• Expertise with graph analytics as it pertains to financial services: entity resolution; graph calculations/ML feature engineering (centrality, clustering, community detection, etc.); path analysis for specific use cases (shortest path, blast radius, user behavior analytics, etc.). 

• Demonstrate executive presence, with ability to immediately establish credibility with executives and additional stakeholders. 

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, in both isolated and hybrid configuration, and understanding the implications of using those technologies and how to manage future evolutions. 

• Background and drug screen. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Master’s degree. 

• Hands-on experience with machine learning and data science model deployment. 

• Experience leading software development in product organization and following best practice SDLC. 

• Strong understanding of data management requirements in financial services, or other regulated industry. 

• Direct experience working with large vendors (such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle). 

• Direct experience building a vendor selection and adoption strategy (key issues, vendors, partners and best practices). 

• Experience with: Salesforce, Google Analytics, SQL Server, Hive, Spark, SQL, and data architecture tools such as HDFS, Aerospike, ElasticSearch, Kafka. 

• Deep understanding of best practices and unique data and analytics requirements across functional areas such Product, Marketing, Data Science, Finance, Operations. 

• Practical experience with available graph technologies such as: Graph OLTP engines (e.g. Neo4j, TigerGraph, AWS Neptune, etc.); Graph OLTP processors (e.g. Boost, etc.) 

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor. 

Physical Requirements 

Working conditions consist of a physical and virtual hybrid office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers. 

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation. 

The base pay scale for this position in:

Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $200,000 - $230,000.

New York, NY/ San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $220,000 - $250,000.

Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness 

• Healthcare Coverage – Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
• Paid Time Off – Unlimited Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.