Senior Data Platform Engineer

Tala was named one of the top 50 FinTech companies in the world. We are a financial technology company on a mission to make financial services simple, inclusive, and accessible for the doers and dreamers globally. More than 5 million people in emerging markets have borrowed through our smartphone app, which provides instant credit scoring, lending, education, and other personalized financial services. Headquartered in Santa Monica, we support the needs of our customers in Kenya, Mexico, Philippines, and India. 
The Role
Our next Senior Data Platform Engineer will contribute their expertise in building and maintaining high quality, monitored data pipelines which draw from a broad variety of business sources. This IC role will work to define and deliver new products and improvements within Tala’s Data Platform team, participating in collaborative design discussions and delivering well-tested, performant solutions which are reliable and trusted by the senior engineering staff. The Senior Data Platform Engineer will proactively identify and address potential barriers to success, both individually and for the team, and take ownership of their solutions. 

What you will do:

• Solve medium to complex problems in the capture, storage, and delivery of business data to Data Science, Business Intelligence, and other client teams.
• Proactively identify issues in key areas of our platform and raise these issues within the team, involving QA, Product, and Business teams appropriately.
• Discuss project goals with Product and Engineering leads to fully grasp the context of each fix or feature and capably participate in product/project definition discussions.
• Consistently set time expectations and meet sprint goals without sacrificing quality of code.
• Participate in the planning process by helping to identify dependencies and technical debt priorities.
• Participate in code/design reviews and approve pull requests, with an eye for code quality, maintainability, test coverage, and good design.

What you will need:

• 4+ years experience working on backend software using modern languages and frameworks (Java, Scala, Python, GoLang)
• 4+ years of engineering experience relating to data engineering and large-scale data transformations
• Strong database experience, both relational and non-relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, HDFS)
• Strong hands-on experience in cloud computing (AWS, EC2, S3, RDS, ELB, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with batch and real-time processing data (Kafka, Airflow)
• Working knowledge in API development for mobile/web use
• Excellent ability to prioritize and communication in a fast paced environment 
• Proficiency in Agile development process
• Degree in Computer Science and/or Math
• Fluent in English

About Tala
Our vision is to build a new financial ecosystem where everyone can participate on equal footing and access the tools they need to be financially healthy. We strongly believe that inclusion fosters innovation and we’re proud to have a diverse global team that represents a multitude of backgrounds, cultures, and experience. We hire talented people regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.