Senior Data Engineer

Valon is transforming mortgage servicing and consumer lending with a technology-first approach, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, managing over $130 billion in loans. They focus on automation, compliance, and creating a modern, AI-native operating system to improve transparency, efficiency, and the homeowner experience. The company is growing and expanding across multiple states, offering opportunities for talented professionals to shape the future of regulated finance.

Location: Remote (US)

Responsibilities

• Own and optimize Valon’s core data infrastructure for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency as data volume and complexity grow.
• Design and extend multi-tenant data architectures to support a scalable SaaS model.
• Evaluate and improve warehouse design, data models, and schema strategies to minimize redundancy and maximize query performance.
• Lead and execute infrastructure migrations with minimal downtime and high data integrity.
• Build and maintain custom ingestion pipelines for data sources not covered by ELT vendors.
• Build or integrate observability tooling for pipeline health, latency, data freshness, drift detection, and schema change monitoring.
• Optimize data transformation jobs for speed and cost efficiency, identifying performance bottlenecks and refactoring as needed.
• Establish and run routine maintenance processes to ensure data quality, stability, and platform consistency.
• Drive a culture of data reliability engineering by codifying best practices, automation, and operational excellence.
• Define and communicate the long-term data infrastructure roadmap, aligning technical evolution with Valon’s business growth.
• Partner closely with the analytics team to enable faster insights through better tooling, performance, and documentation.
• Act as a force multiplier for the broader data team - mentoring on best practices and improving development velocity across pipelines and models.
• Collaborate with platform and product teams to design systems that meet business, operational, and regulatory requirements.
• Occasionally take on complex, non-infrastructure data projects, such as data products or analytical initiatives, to stay close to end-user needs and maintain empathy with analysts.

Requirements

• 4+ years of data engineering experience successfully creating/optimizing/scaling data stacks and supporting data teams, at least 2 years in an early- to mid-stage startup.
• Deep knowledge and experience deploying and optimizing dbt or comparable tooling.
• Experience managing multiple types of data management systems (data warehouses, data marts, data lakes).
• Experience building/procuring tools and processes to monitor end-to-end data stack health.
• Mastery of SQL from both functionality and performance perspective.
• Fluency in writing scripts in Python or a similar language.
• Experience working with and tuning cloud data warehouses and compute environments. Experience with BigQuery/GCP a plus.
• Experience optimizing BI tool performance and managing permissions, Looker experience a plus.
• Experience managing/tuning EL connector solutions (such as Fivetran, Stitch, etc.) and building custom ingestion pipelines.
• Strong prioritization skills, effort vs. impact thinking, stakeholder management.
• Ability to reason about factors/interactions/root causes outcomes across the data stack, able to back up arguments/decisions with data.
• Deep understanding of data team workstreams and needs, ideally in the form of past experience as a data analyst/data scientist.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and 401(k) plan.
• Health & well-being: comprehensive medical, dental, & vision benefits.
• Company-wide orientation and learning & development opportunities.
• Regular review cycles with 360-degree feedback.
• 17 days paid time off, sick days, and 11 company holidays.
• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents.

Additional Information

• Throughout the interview process, emails will only be from valon.com email addresses.
• Valon is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.