Data Engineering Manager

About the role

Self Financial is a venture-backed, high-growth FinTech company with a mission to increase economic inclusion and financial resilience by empowering people to build credit and build savings. We are seeking a Data Engineering Manager to lead the design, execution, and reliability of the data platforms that power our credit decisioning, risk analytics, and financial reporting. The successful manager will be a hands-on technical leader who balances people management with deep architectural and implementation work. You will own the health and roadmap of our core data infrastructure while guiding a team of engineers through a critical modernization effort. This role requires fluency in both strategic data platform direction and the practical execution of pipelines and warehouse structures. You will work closely with cross-functional partners to ensure data capabilities directly support our mission of expanding financial resilience for consumers who need it most.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead a small, high-leverage data engineering team responsible for the infrastructure and pipelines that power credit decisioning, risk, analytics, and financial reporting across Self Financial.

Own the architecture and design of our data warehouse, transformation layer (dbt), and orchestration systems, ensuring they support reliability, governance, and scalability.

Actively participate in technical design reviews and code pull request reviews to maintain high standards for data platform implementations.

Drive the modernization roadmap, including a multi-quarter migration toward a lakehouse architecture using Iceberg and Spark.

Partner closely with Analytics, Risk, and Platform/Infrastructure teams to translate business and reporting requirements into robust data platform capabilities.

Establish and enforce data platform governance, including model maturity standards, access controls, data quality checks, and schema design best practices.

Manage the full lifecycle of data platform services, from initial design and deployment through monitoring, incident response, and iterative improvement.

Evaluate and recommend tooling and infrastructure choices to improve developer experience, pipeline efficiency, and operational reliability.

Unblock hard technical problems by diving into implementation details while still providing strategic direction for the team and platform.

Hire, mentor, and develop data engineers, aligning individual growth with the evolving needs of the data platform and business objectives.

Requirements

You have designed, built, or operated modern data warehouse and lakehouse systems, and you are comfortable making technical tradeoffs in these environments.

You can read and critique dbt models, pipeline DAGs, and schema designs, and you form informed opinions based on implementation realities.

You are comfortable being a contributor in data platform design conversations, not just a reviewer of plans created by others.

You want to manage people but you do not want to lose your technical edge; you will remain an active practitioner alongside your team.

You care deeply about data quality, governance, and reliability, and you treat these concerns with the same priority as throughput and speed.

You have experience working in regulated financial services environments where data accuracy and compliance are critical.

You are passionate about helping people build or rebuild their financial future through the data and infrastructure that enables those opportunities.

You communicate clearly and constructively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating complex topics into actionable plans.

Nice to have

Experience with modern data stack tools such as Snowflake, Spark, dbt, and orchestration frameworks.

Familiarity with open table formats like Iceberg and implementation details in execution engines.

Background building and operating platforms in cloud environments with strong security and compliance practices.

Practical notes

This is a working technical manager role, not a generalist engineering management role; we need someone who has actually built and operated modern data platforms, not just managed teams that did.

The role is based in Austin, TX, and aligns with Self Financial's commitment to diverse, inclusive teams that challenge the status quo in the credit industry.