About the RoleHappen Bank's Data Operations Center ensures consistent, reliable delivery of data that powers critical business functions across finance, accounting, investor reporting, and collections. As a Lead Data Engineer, you'll lead the Financial Data Operations team, owning the pipelines that support month-end close, investor servicing, revenue recognition, and other high-impact processes that keep the business running smoothly. You'll act as the bridge between engineering, product, and business stakeholders while building team capability and driving operational excellence through smart automation and AI-driven improvements.
What You'll Do- Lead a cross-functional scrum team of onshore and offshore data engineers, setting priorities and removing blockers to deliver reliable data products
- Own the architecture, maintenance, and continuous improvement of critical financial data pipelines that support GL automation, investor reporting, tax documents, and collections workflows
- Partner with finance, accounting, and operations stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
- Drive adoption of modern data platform capabilities, including Databricks, dbt, Elementary, and Dagster, while maintaining existing production systems
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI tools for QA automation, code review, performance optimization, and documentation standardization
- Build and improve monitoring, alerting, and observability practices to ensure pipeline reliability and rapid incident response
- Establish coding standards and data quality frameworks that scale across the team and reduce operational overhead
- Use AI to create intelligent runbooks, diagnostic agents, and self-service tools that empower L1 support and accelerate troubleshooting
About You- 8+ years of experience in data engineering, with 2+ years leading teams or projects in a technical lead capacity; bachelor's degree in a related field; or equivalent work experience
- You have hands-on experience using AI tools to accelerate your work and improve output quality - you're equally comfortable using them yourself and showing colleagues how, and you're thoughtful about limitations and where human judgment matters most
- Strong expertise in SQL, data modeling, data warehouse concepts, and building production data pipelines at scale
- Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow, Oozie, or Dagster and distributed processing frameworks like Spark or PySpark
- Working knowledge of AWS services (EMR, S3, Redshift) and modern data platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks
- You take ownership of outcomes, proactively identifying risks and workflow improvements before they become blockers
- Strong communication and organizational skills with experience collaborating across business, product, and engineering teams
- Experience leading or mentoring offshore engineering teams and managing work across time zones
- You balance technical depth with business context, understanding how data pipelines support financial processes and regulatory requirements
Nice to Have- Experience with dbt for data transformation and Elementary for data validation
- Hands-on use of AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, or GitHub Copilot to improve development workflows
- Background in financial services, accounting systems, or investor reporting processes
- Experience building self-service analytics tools using Streamlit or similar frameworks
- Familiarity with data quality frameworks, alerting systems, and SRE practices for data infrastructure
Work Location San Francisco
The above locations are eligible offices for this role. The locations have been determined to foster in-person collaboration with this role's team or the related business lines. We utilize a hybrid work model, and our teams are in-office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In-person attendance is essential for this role's success, and remote placement will not be considered. Happen Bank offers relocation, based on actual job level.
Time Zone Requirements Local hours (PT)
While the position will primarily work local hours, Happen Bank is headquartered in Pacific Time and our ideal candidate will be flexible working across time zones when necessary.
Travel Requirements As needed travel to Happen Bank offices and/or other locations, as needed.
Compensation The target base salary range for this position is 190,000-220,000. The base salary of the role will be determined by job-related knowledge, experience, education, skills, and location. Base salary is just one part of Happen Bank's Total Rewards package. You may also be eligible for long-term awards (equity) and an annual bonus (which is based on company performance, employee performance and eligible earnings).
We're creating new financial services solutions for our members based on fairness, simplicity, and heart, and we treat our employees the same way. We offer a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision plans for employees and their families, 401(k) match, health and wellness programs, flexible time off policies for salaried employees, up to 16 weeks paid parental leave and more.
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