Senior Data Engineer (Fintech Startup)

About CRED iQ

CRED iQ is a commercial real estate data, analytics, and valuation platform providing actionable intelligence to CRE (Commercial Real Estate) and capital markets investors. Launched in 2020, our proprietary platform was developed with leading-edge technologies, and delivers real-time commercial real estate data through a user-friendly interface. CRED iQ leverages big data, machine learning technologies, and geospatial analytics to provide solid lead generation opportunities and analytics to the CRE finance community. Subscribers to CRED iQ use this platform to identify opportunities for leasing, refinancing, mezzanine lending, distressed debt, and acquisition. The founders have a successful history of developing commercial real estate analytics platforms.

CRED iQ leverages big data, machine learning technologies, and geospatial analytics to deliver its breakthrough data, analytics and user experience.

Senior Data Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer with 5+ years of experience to own the pipelines that ingest, transform, and deliver our commercial real estate data, and to bring down what they cost to run.

You will run our Airflow orchestration, tune our PostgreSQL databases, and manage data delivery to clients through Snowflake and other delivery methods. Cost is a first-class engineering metric here: you will be measured on spend per pipeline and per delivery alongside reliability and data freshness.

This is a hands-on role with real ownership. You will decide where the money and compute go, make the case with data, and ship the changes yourself.

Candidate Qualifications

The ideal candidate is a hands-on data engineer who has owned production pipelines end to end and treats cost as an engineering metric alongside reliability and data freshness. You will be experienced with large loan, property, and financial datasets, write expert SQL, and have strong knowledge of PostgreSQL internals. You can show, with numbers, what you measured, what you changed, and what it saved. You will have a degree in CS, CE, EE or have the equivalent practical experience.

Key Responsibilities

Pipelines & Orchestration

• Design, build, and maintain Airflow DAGs that ingest, validate, and transform large volumes of loan, property, and financial data from internal and third-party sources.
• Make pipelines incremental and idempotent, so reruns and backfills are safe and reprocess only what changed.
• Right-size scheduling, concurrency, pools, and worker resources so jobs finish on time without idle or oversized compute.
• Own monitoring, alerting, and on-call triage for pipeline failures and late data.

Database Performance & Cost

• Tune PostgreSQL for both speed and spend: query plans, indexing, partitioning, vacuum and bloat, and connection management.
• Find and fix the most expensive queries and jobs using pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN plans, and database performance metrics.
• Right-size instances, storage, and read replicas, and set retention and archival policies for data that no longer needs hot storage.
• Review schema and data model changes for their performance and cost impact before they ship.
• Monitor database usage and access for audits.

Snowflake Delivery

• Build and operate client data deliveries in Snowflake, including secure data shares and scheduled loads.
• Control Snowflake spend: warehouse sizing, auto-suspend, clustering, incremental loads, and resource monitors with budgets.
• Guarantee delivery quality with row-count, schema, and reconciliation checks between PostgreSQL and Snowflake.

Cost Ownership

• Build cost visibility: attribute compute, storage, and warehouse spend to individual pipelines, datasets, and client deliveries.
• Set cost baselines and targets, report on them regularly, and lead the work that closes the gap.
• Weigh cost against freshness and reliability, and explain the trade-off clearly to engineering and business stakeholders.
• Mentor other engineers and set standards for cost-aware pipeline and SQL design through code review.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Partner with product managers, engineers, and research teams to meet evolving data needs.
• Create automated data exports and views for CRE Research and external clients.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, including ownership of production pipelines end to end.
• Deep Apache Airflow experience: DAG design, scheduling, backfills, retries, resource tuning, and debugging failed runs.
• Expert SQL and strong PostgreSQL internals knowledge: query planning, indexing strategies, partitioning, locking, and vacuum behavior.
• Hands-on Snowflake experience delivering data to external consumers, including data sharing and warehouse cost management.
• A track record of cutting data infrastructure cost, with numbers: what you measured, what you changed, and what it saved.
• Strong Python for pipeline code, data validation, and tooling.
• Experience running data workloads on a major cloud platform (preferably AWS) and reading its billing and usage data.
• Sound data modeling judgment and a habit of building data quality checks into every pipeline.
• Clear written communication. You can explain a cost or performance trade-off to a non-engineer in a paragraph.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with commercial real estate, CMBS, or other structured finance and loan-level data.
• Experience building client data feeds with delivery SLAs and audit requirements.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and containerized workloads.
• FinOps practice: cost tagging, chargeback or showback reporting, and budget alerting.
• Experience working in a SOC 2 environment, including access controls and audit logging for data systems.

Tech Stack

Area

Tools

Orchestration

Apache Airflow

Databases

PostgreSQL

Client delivery

Snowflake, Amazon S3, and other delivery methods

Languages

Python, SQL

Cloud

AWS

We are seeking candidates who are self-motivated professionals and are eager to help grow a burgeoning business.

Compensation and Comprehensive Benefits Package

• Salary of $115,000 - $140,000 per year
• Equity Options
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Short Term Disability, HSA, and 401K
• Flexible Work Schedule / Remote Work (CRED iQ is a fully remote company)
• A work environment built on teamwork, flexibility, and respect.

CRED iQ is an equal opportunity employer and fintech startup that thrives in a fast-paced dynamic environment. If you would like to apply or learn more about this opportunity, please contact us at careers@cred-iq.com.

CRED iQ does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status or any other basis covered by appropriate law.

Pay: $115,000.00 - $140,000.00 per year

Benefits

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Health savings account
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Work Location: Remote