Senior Data Architect/Founding Data Engineer - Python/PySpark

Job Title : Senior Data Architect / Founding Data Engineer

Experience : 8+ Years

About the Company :

Our client is a fast-growing, VC-funded US-based Financial CRM Product company focused on building next-generation, AI-powered data and analytics platforms for the financial services industry.

The company has been operating successfully in the US for the last 5 years and already has a strong team of 50+ employees in the US. As part of its expansion strategy, the organization is now building its Global Capability Center (GCC) in India to drive product engineering, data architecture, and platform innovation.

This is an opportunity to join at an early stage and play a key role in building highly scalable, cloud-native enterprise data systems from the ground up.

Role Overview :

We are looking for a highly skilled Senior Data Architect / Founding Data Engineer who can design, build, and scale modern cloud-native data platforms completely from scratch.

This is not a traditional support or maintenance role. We are specifically looking for a hands-on architect and strong coder with deep expertise across Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, Cloud Architecture, and

Analytics systems.

The ideal candidate should be someone who :

- Has architected and built scalable data infrastructure end-to-end

- Is extremely strong in coding and distributed data systems

- Understands cloud-native architectures deeply

- Can work across platform engineering, data engineering, and data science ecosystems

- Thinks beyond pipelines and focuses on business outcomes, scalability, and engineering excellence

You will work closely with product, engineering, and business teams to build production-grade, high performance data systems for a fast-growing financial CRM platform.

Key Responsibilities :

- Architect and build end-to-end enterprise data platforms from scratch

- Design scalable data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and analytics layers

- Build high-performance ETL / ELT pipelines for structured and semi-structured data

- Develop distributed data processing systems using PySpark, Spark SQL, and Python

- Lead cloud-native data platform implementation on AWS

- Architect scalable ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and serving layers

- Build reusable platform components and engineering frameworks for data operations

- Optimize performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency across the platform

- Drive best practices around data governance, observability, security, and reliability

- Work closely with analytics, product, and business teams to translate requirements into scalable technical

solutions

- Mentor engineering teams and establish strong engineering standards

- Contribute hands-on to coding, debugging, optimization, and platform evolution

Must-Have Skills :

- 8+ years of experience in Data Engineering / Data Architecture

- Proven experience building data infrastructure from scratch

- Strong expertise in cloud-native architectures and distributed systems

- Deep hands-on experience with AWS Cloud (S3, Glue, Lambda, Redshift, IAM, EC2, EMR, etc.)

- Strong expertise in Spark / PySpark / Spark SQL

- Excellent programming skills in Python

- Advanced SQL expertise with strong query optimization knowledge

- Hands-on experience with Snowflake or modern cloud data warehouses

- Strong understanding of Data Modeling, Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Datamarts

- Experience building scalable batch and near real-time data pipelines

- Strong platform engineering fundamentals and infrastructure understanding

- Experience working with large-scale production-grade data systems

- Strong debugging, optimization, and system design capabilities

Preferred / Good-to-Have Skills :

- Exposure to Data Science / AI / ML ecosystems

- Experience with modern orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, etc.)

- Experience in financial services, fintech, CRM, or analytics products

- Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering

- Exposure to Kubernetes / containerized cloud-native deployments

- Experience with real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, etc.)

What We Are Looking For :

We are specifically looking for someone who :

- Is a strong coder first, architect second

- Can independently design and deliver systems end-to-end

- Has built scalable platforms rather than only managing pipelines

- Can think deeply about architecture, optimization, and business impact

- Is comfortable operating in a fast-paced, product-driven startup environment

- Has high ownership and builder mindset mentality

Why Join?

- Opportunity to help build the India GCC from an early stage

- Work directly on a US-based financial CRM product

- Build and own enterprise-scale data platforms from scratch

- Exposure to modern cloud-native architectures and AI-driven ecosystems

- High ownership and leadership visibility

- Collaborative engineering culture focused on innovation and execution

- Strong long-term growth opportunities

Benefits :

- Health insurance

- Paid time off

- Learning & development support

- Opportunity to work directly with leadership and global stakeholders