Senior Data Engineer

Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system for real-time movement of digital money across traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. The Senior Data Engineer will build the foundational data ingestion and governance layer for the analytical platform, evaluate platform options, establish compliance-focused data practices, and define reliable production standards. The role also includes documenting technical decisions and mentoring less-senior data engineers.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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