Data Engineer

About the Role

Are you ready to shape the financial future of a rapidly growing fintech that's transforming lives across Southeast Asia and beyond?

We're not your typical company — we're a rocketship! At FINN, established in 2022 by experienced serial founders, we're on a mission to transform financial well-being for underbanked employees. Our product provides early wage access, financial education, budgeting tools, part-time job opportunities, and micro-insurances. We've hit product-market fit with explosive growth during the past 12 months.

We're looking for a Data Engineer to own the data modeling, pipeline development, and analytics layer that powers decision-making across every department at FINN. This is a high-impact, foundational hire — you'll be one of the first dedicated data team members, working alongside our Data Platform Engineer who builds the infrastructure you'll operate on.

This role starts as a combined Data Engineer + Data Analyst position. You'll build the pipelines and deliver the insights. As FINN scales from 3–4 markets to 10–12 and the data team grows, this role will specialize into a dedicated Data Engineering function with separate Data Analysts joining the team.

You'll report to the CTO and work closely with department data owners across Product, Operations, Credit Risk, and Finance to turn raw data into reliable, well-modeled datasets and actionable dashboards.

 

What You'll Do

Immediate Priorities (Year 1)

• Build and maintain data models in dbt, establishing naming conventions, documentation standards, and testing patterns
• Define and implement core business metrics in collaboration with department data owners (Product, Operations, Finance, Credit Risk)
• Create and maintain dashboards and reports that drive operational and strategic decisions
• Design and build data pipelines for ingesting data from internal services and external sources into BigQuery
• Establish data quality checks and monitoring to ensure reliability of key metrics
• Partner with the Data Platform Engineer to shape the data infrastructure roadmap from an end-user perspective

Scaling & Ownership (Year 2)

• Own the full data model layer — dimensional models, staging tables, and marts — with clear documentation and lineage
• Build self-service datasets that enable non-technical stakeholders to answer their own questions
• Develop automated pipelines for recurring cross-department data requests (replacing ad-hoc queries)
• Collaborate with the Credit Risk team on portfolio analytics, scoring model data, and regulatory reporting data needs
• Implement data governance practices: ownership metadata, freshness SLAs, and access controls in coordination with the Data Platform Engineer
• Drive adoption of metric definitions and a single source of truth across departments

Team Growth & Specialization (Year 2+)

• Mentor incoming Data Analysts as the team expands, establishing engineering best practices for the analytics layer
• Transition analytical workload to dedicated Data Analysts while focusing on complex data engineering challenges
• Lead the design of new data products — real-time dashboards, predictive model feature stores, and embedded analytics
• Contribute to FINN's data mesh evolution by owning domain-specific data products

 

Technical Requirements

Must Have

• 2+ years of professional experience in data engineering or analytics engineering
• Strong SQL — you can write complex queries, optimize performance, and design efficient data models
• Python proficiency for data pipeline development, scripting, and automation
• Experience with BigQuery or an equivalent cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, Redshift)
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining data pipelines and ETL/ELT processes
• Working knowledge of dbt (or demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly — we're actively building our dbt layer)
• Experience with dashboard and visualization tools (Looker, Metabase, or similar)
• Solid understanding of data modeling — dimensional design, star/snowflake schemas, slowly changing dimensions

Nice to Have

• FinTech or regulated industry experience (lending, payments, insurance)
• Exposure to credit risk data, portfolio analytics, or financial reporting
• Familiarity with Terraform or Infrastructure as Code
• Experience with streaming data or real-time pipelines (Pub/Sub, Kafka, Dataflow)
• Experience working in a startup scaling from early stage to multi-market operations

 

What Makes You Successful

• Ownership Mindset: You don't wait for tickets — you identify what the business needs and build it. At FINN, we operate in "hard mode" and everyone owns outcomes, not just tasks.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: You're comfortable sitting with a Finance lead or a Product Manager to understand their data needs and translating that into well-modeled, tested datasets.
• Rigor and Attention to Detail: Bad data is worse than no data. You care deeply about data quality, testing, and documentation.
• Tenacity and Drive: We're scaling to $100M ARR by 2028 across 10–12 markets. This is fast-paced, ambiguous, and demanding — you thrive in that environment.
• Communication: You can explain data models and metric definitions to non-technical stakeholders clearly and patiently.
• Builder Energy: You're excited about creating something from scratch, not maintaining a legacy system. You'll be defining how FINN thinks about data.

 

Our Stack

• Data Warehouse: GCP BigQuery
• Transformation: dbt
• Backend: AWS services
• Languages: Python, SQL
• IaC: Terraform
• Dashboards: Looker (evolving)
• Orchestration: To be determined (in collaboration with Data/Platform Team)
• Methodology: Agile/Scrum — 2-week sprints

 

Relationship to Data Platform Engineer

At scale this role will work in close partnership with the Data Platform Engineering Team (to be built out) who will build and maintain the underlying data infrastructure (BigQuery configuration, Terraform, orchestration, data mesh architecture). As a Data Engineer, you operate on that platform — building the models, pipelines, metrics, and dashboards that deliver value to the business. Together, you will form the foundation of FINN's data team.