Staff Data Engineer

Staff Data Engineer

About the role

Fora is in the process of modernizing its data stack to build the foundation for agentic products and analytics. To lead this effort, we are hiring a Staff Data Engineer to build and own the platform backbone for governed reporting and trusted AI workflows.

This is a hands-on Staff IC role on a small Data & AI team. You will make strategic architecture calls—from ingestion patterns and Snowflake design to data contracts and SLAs—and then get into the weeds to build, harden, or rebuild pipelines.

We are looking for a systems thinker who understands business impact and operational burden, and who can partner closely with Analytics, Engineering, and vendors to turn fragmented source systems into trustworthy data products.

What you will own

Architecture & Strategy

Data platform architecture

: ingestion patterns, warehouse design, environment strategy, orchestration, access governance, and reliability standards.

Freshness & ingestion strategy:

Deciding when to use streaming versus batch based on business value, cost, and operational burden.

Cross-functional partnership:

Partnering with Platform Engineering to ensure our data infrastructure integrates securely and reliably with core operational systems.

Execution & Reliability

Data Integrations:

requirements → source profiling → ingestion design → QA → documentation → support.

Pipeline reliability:

dependencies, retries, alerts, backfills, incident response, runbooks, monitoring, and support expectations.

Legacy migration:

helping retire brittle reporting paths such as Azure Data Factory, SQL backup workflows, and other duplicate pipelines.

Governance & Quality

Snowflake governance:

roles, permissions, service accounts, connector ownership, environment separation, performance, cost, and governance.

Data contracts:

schema-change handling, new-field availability, upstream SLAs, source defects, and escalation paths.

Data observability:

freshness, volume movement, nulls, duplicates, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and critical business-rule checks.

AI-enabled leverage:

using AI and automation to accelerate debugging, documentation, pipeline scaffolding, and operational workflows.

What we are looking for

• Deep data engineering judgment.
• You have designed, built, and operated production platforms, not just individual pipelines.
• Hands-on depth.
• You move seamlessly from high-level architecture to writing production code, standing up CI/CD workflows, and debugging pipeline failures.
• Strong ingestion fundamentals.
• APIs, CDC, backfills, idempotency, schema drift, and failure recovery.
• Snowflake fluency.
• Warehouse design, RBAC, performance tuning, and cost controls.
• Data quality discipline.
• You know which checks matter and make quality visible before users find issues.
• Ownership & communication.
• You can sequence ambiguous work, write useful design docs, align technical decisions with business outcomes, and carry problems to resolution.
• Cross-functional partnership.
• You work with stakeholders across Engineering, Analytics, and the business to understand needs, define clear requirements, and build trust.
• AI leverage.
• You use LLMs and agents to accelerate your own work, and you build data products that agents can consume safely.
• Nice to have
• Lending, fintech, or financial-services data experience.
• CDC, Debezium, dbt Cloud, Dagster, Airflow, or equivalent tooling.
• Fluency with Azure data services such as Event Hubs, Blob Storage, Azure SQL, and Azure DevOps.
• Data observability with Monte Carlo, Elementary, dbt tests, custom monitors, or similar.
• Data contracts, source SLAs, or schema-change processes with Engineering teams.
• AI-native analytics, semantic layers, MCP servers, agentic orchestration, or governed context retrieval.
• Familiarity with open table formats such as Apache Iceberg.

Base salary:

$175,000–$200,000

Fully remote within the US; Eastern or Central time zones preferred.

Reports to the VP of Data & AI.

Final compensation is based on scope of past ownership, technical judgment, and ability to set direction independently.

About Fora Financial

Fora Financial is a technology-enabled provider of flexible financing to small and medium-sized businesses. Since 2008, we have supported more than 55,000 merchants nationwide with over $4 billion in capital for operating expenses, cash-flow management, and growth.

Our proprietary technology helps deliver capital through a streamlined process that can be completed in as little as 24 hours, compared with the weeks or months often required for a traditional bank loan. Fora has grown from two founders in a small Manhattan workspace to a company of nearly 200 employees with a collaborative, partner-centric culture.

Equal Opportunity Statement