Senior Data Engineer

About The Team

Sparrow is a consumer lending startup born with a mission to empower the underserved and overlooked. We have designed a revolutionary credit card, meticulously crafted to help guide our customers on a journey to financial freedom.

The data engineering team is dedicated to designing, building, and maintaining large-scale data infrastructure, pipelines, lakehouse, and reporting layers that enable data-driven insights and drive business success. We manage the entire data lifecycle—from ingestion to transformation and delivery—leveraging modern data processing technologies and innovative approaches to deliver high-quality, efficient, and reliable data solutions that support Sparrow’s rapid growth.

About The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to own and develop the data platform that sits at the heart of Sparrow’s operations. You’ll work across our lakehouse, pipeline orchestration, and API systems — designing, building, and scaling the infrastructure that turns raw financial events into reliable, auditable business outcomes.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll write code, review designs, mentor engineers, and make architectural decisions that affect the reliability and scalability of production pipelines spanning batch, streaming, and event-driven workloads.

This person will report to the Director of Data Engineering.

What You’ll Work On

• Lakehouse & Data Modeling — Design and maintain fact/dimension tables in Delta Lake covering accounts, payments, transactions, disputes, collections, and more. Evolve our Unity Catalog strategy across landing, lakehouse, and pipeline layers.
• Pipeline Orchestration — Improve orchestration patterns, dependency management, and failure recovery across complex multi-stage workflows.
• Streaming & Ingestion — Ensure schema evolution, exactly-once semantics, and low-latency availability of operational data.
• API Integrations — Own the async services and improve concurrency, retry logic, rate limiting, and observability.
• Infrastructure & Platform — Contribute to Terraform-managed infrastructure and improve CI/CD, testing, and deployment patterns.
• Data Quality & Reliability — Strengthen validation frameworks, dead-letter handling, and alerting.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.
• 4+ years of professional software or data engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in PySpark and Delta Lake — you’ve built and maintained large-scale Lakehouse architecture.
• Production experience orchestrating complex, multi-stage pipelines across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Strong Python fundamentals — async programming, Pydantic data modeling, clean separation of concerns, and test-driven development.
• Hands-on experience with AWS data services (VPC, S3, MSK, RDS, ECS, etc.).
• Comfort with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code for managing cloud resources.
• Experience with streaming data (Kafka, Structured Streaming) alongside batch pipelines.
• A track record of improving data quality, observability, and reliability in production systems.
• Financial services or fintech experience is a strong plus — familiarity with compliance reporting (Credit Bureau, FCRA/OFAC), NACHA, collections workflows, or account lifecycle management.

Why This Role

• Real impact — Your pipelines directly power collections decisions, fraud detection, compliance reporting, and customer engagement for a live credit card product.
• Architectural ownership — You’ll shape how we evolve our data platform strategy.
• Breadth and depth — Work across batch, streaming, event-driven, and API systems in a single platform.
• Growing team — Help define engineering culture, hiring standards, and technical direction as the team scales.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

Compensation, Benefits, and Perks

• Medical, dental and vision coverage, with a 100% company-paid employee-only option
• Generous paid time off and 14 company holidays per year
• $50 per month Wellness Stipend - to use in any way that helps you thrive!
• Paid parental leave
• 401(k) Plan with 4% matching
• Stock options

More About Sparrow

At Sparrow, we believe that we can grant credit to the underserved and overlooked better than any company that exists today. We believe that we can have a significant impact on society by reducing the financial burden of having less than perfect credit. And we believe in fostering a workplace culture that embodies purpose, community, freedom, and transparency. At Sparrow, we know we are only as great as the people we hire, and without them we will never achieve our collective aspirations. Come join us!