Senior Data Engineer

Remote (U.S.) — Full Time

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we’re creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network—banks, digital asset exchanges, and, most importantly, the customers they serve.

About the Role

You'll own the data ingestion and governance layer for Cari's analytical platform—the domain that turns our transactional systems into something compliance, reporting, and future analytics use cases can actually trust. There is no existing data lake or warehouse today, so you'll be building foundational pipelines and governance practices from a largely blank slate, working within an evaluation of platform options that engineering leadership is running against compliance and governance criteria. You'll be the trusted technical decision-maker for how data actually moves and is governed and a key technical voice in the platform evaluation itself.

What You'll Do

  • Own the ingestion pipeline design from our transactional and event infrastructure (PostgreSQL, Kafka/MSK) into the analytical platform, with a clear boundary around what's replicated, transformed, or derived

  • Contribute deep technical input to the analytical platform evaluation — AWS-native tooling vs. Snowflake vs. Databricks — particularly on governance, compliance, and data residency tradeoffs

  • Build the data governance practices for your domain: access controls, audit logging, and data lineage that satisfy bank-partner and regulatory evidentiary requirements

  • Enforce the boundary that keeps the analytical layer strictly derived from our transactional Postgres source of truth — this system should never become a shadow source of truth or a path back into live transaction processing

  • Define data quality and reconciliation practices so downstream consumers — compliance reporting, dashboards, future analytics — can trust what they're querying

  • Write RFCs and design docs for ingestion and governance decisions that other engineers, including ones outside the data function, can act on

  • Define what "production-ready" means for the data pipelines you own: monitoring, alerting, and failure recovery

  • Mentor less-senior data engineers as the function grows beyond its first hire

Qualifications

  • 5–7 years of data engineering experience, including hands-on pipeline design work, not just operating within a platform someone else built

  • Working knowledge of the tradeoffs between AWS-native data tooling, Snowflake, and Databricks, particularly around governance and compliance rather than pure performance

  • Experience building data governance practices—access control, audit logging, data lineage—ideally in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment (fintech, healthcare, or similar)

  • Solid understanding of keeping an analytical layer strictly derived from a transactional source of truth, and the failure modes when that boundary erodes

  • Production experience with data pipeline and ingestion tooling from streaming or event-driven sources (Kafka/MSK or equivalent) and transactional databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent)

  • Strong written communication—comfortable writing design docs that stakeholders outside the data function rely on

  • Comfortable owning a domain independently while operating in a still-forming function without an established playbook

Nice to Haves

  • Prior experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment where data governance carried contractual or regulatory weight

  • Familiarity with blockchain or on-chain data (transaction history, event logs) as an analytical data source

  • Experience with SOC 2, data residency, or similar compliance frameworks from the data platform side

  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform or equivalent) for provisioning data infrastructure

  • Experience mentoring engineers into data platform roles

What We Offer

  • Competitive compensation: salary, bonus, and equity

  • Full medical, vision, dental benefits

  • 401(k) with matching program

  • Flexible vacation policy (PTO) and remote-first work environment

Interested in this role? Send us your resume.

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