Senior Data Engineer

About the Company Valon is transforming both mortgage servicing and consumer direct lending with a technology-first approach. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and managing over $130 billion in loans, we’ve built our platforms from the ground up—not on outdated legacy systems—so homeowners, lenders, and investors experience greater transparency, efficiency, and care. By unifying processes into a modern, AI-native operating system, we’re leading the way in automation, compliance, and continuous improvement across our servicing and lending businesses. Our mission is to empower every homeowner by making the mortgage experience simple, secure, and financially empowering. To achieve this, we bring together world-class engineers, servicing experts, lending professionals, and operations leaders who share a passion for improving the homeowner journey. We’re not only reshaping what servicing and lending look like today—we’re creating opportunities for talented people to help drive the future of the industry. As we continue to grow, Valon is expanding its footprint across multiple states, opening the door to exciting new roles and career paths. Joining Valon means becoming part of a fast-scaling company where innovation, collaboration, and customer impact go hand in hand. Mortgage is just the beginning—we’re building the future of regulated finance, and we want you to be part of it. About the Role We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to own all facets of data infrastructure at Valon. You will be responsible for managing/optimizing our core data infrastructure, building/maintaining custom data ingestion pipelines, optimizing/implementing complex data transformations, and partnering with the analytics team to architect the optimal long-term infra strategy for Valon. You will be the data team’s infrastructure quarterback, and success will mean standing up the proper tooling or processes and flexibly problem-solving to ensure the team is able to carry out its mission efficiently and seamlessly. Responsibilities Core Data Infrastructure & Scalability 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. Observability, Performance & Maintenance 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. Strategic Leadership & Enablement Define and communicate the long-term data infrastructure roadmap, aligning technical evolution with Valon’s business growth. Think strategically: What does our infrastructure need to look like at 10x or 100x scale? 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. Cross-Functional Execution 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. Qualifications 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 Compensation: competitive salary and 401(k) plan Health & well-being: we’ll invest in your physical and mental well-being with comprehensive medical, dental, & vision benefits Grow together: Company-wide orientation for you to successfully onboard and other learning & development opportunities, including regular review cycles that feature 360-degree feedback Generous time off: 17 days paid time off, sick days, and 11 company holidays Baby bonding time!: 12 weeks off for both birthing and non-birthing parents - fully paid so you can focus your energy on your newest addition Throughout the interview process, please remember that emails will only be from valon.com email addresses. We will never ask for any personally identifiable information during the interview process itself. Please reach out to [email protected] if you have any requests to verify the authenticity of an outreach. Valon is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws. Valon makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time. Please mention the word **FRESH** and tag ROjox when applying to show you read the job post completely (#ROjox). This is a beta feature to avoid spam applicants. Companies can search these words to find applicants that read this and see they're human.