Wagestream is hiring aHead / Director of Data Engineering

Wagestream is on a mission to bring better financial wellbeing to frontline workers.

We partner with some of the world’s most famous employers, like Bupa, Green King, Burger King and the NHS, to give their teams access to fairer financial services - all built around flexible pay. Over three million people can now choose how often they’re paid, track their shifts and earnings, start saving, use budgeting tools, get free financial coaching, and access fairer financial products. All in one financial wellbeing super-app.

Wagestream is unique: VC-backed and growing at scale-up pace, but with a social conscience. Some of the world's leading financial charities and impact funds were our founding investors, and we operate on a social charter - which means every product we build has to improve financial health and reduce the $5.6bn ‘premium’ lower-income earners pay for financial services each year.

You’d be joining a team of over 200 passionate, ambitious people, across Europe and the USA, building a category-leading fintech product and all united by that same mission.

The Opportunity:

We are seeking a seasoned Head / Director of Data Engineering to lead our data engineering function. This new role will fully own our data platform, data governance and data architecture, working closely with stakeholders, Data Scientists and Analytics Engineers. Data analysis is a team sport at Wagestream - we expect everyone to be able to understand and interrogate data. The goal for this team is to build a robust self-service platform that to makes it easy to deliver data products, make decisions and drive revenue growth in a decentralised manner.

Our current stack is simple: Snowflake for data warehousing, dbt and git for analytical engineering, Tableau/Redash for data visualisation, R/Python for statistical analysis.

What will you be doing?

• Lead the scaling, development and deployment of data infrastructure to power innovation and growth
• Ensure efficient data ingestion, aggregation, and processing for fast and slow moving data
• Implement a robust data governance framework, ensuring quality, cataloging, and discoverability.
• Oversee the build of core data products and ML models, balancing between OLTP and OLAP systems
• Define and deliver a forward looking data architecture and strategy, in line with business goals
• Guide best practices for data modelling and optimisation supporting embedded Data Scientists and Analytics Engineers
• Take ownership and improve AI platform capabilities, initially focused on MLOps
• Enforce data compliance standards, including PII masking, data obfuscation, and RBAC.
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and reliability of the data products.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to deliver impactful data-driven solutions.

What experience might you have?

• Prior leadership and management experience within a data function, ideally within a financial or regulated environment
• Expertise in data governance, including quality frameworks, cataloging, lineage, and compliance.
• Strong knowledge of core data and ML solutions alongside decentralised operating models, such as data mesh.
• A willingness to be hands-on and get involved in the details to drive results, rather than waiting for others.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Proven experience building and scaling data platforms and pipelines for both batch (ETL) and real-time data.
• Significant experience with SQL, dbt and Snowflake.
• Broad understanding of OLTP and OLAP data architectures.
• Engineering or statistical modelling background

Working Policy: We operate a hybrid policy; you’ll be in our beautiful London office 2-3 days a week, with flexibility to work from home.

Benefits:

• 25 Days Annual Leave in addition to public holidays (up to 5 day rollover), as well as flexible time off allowances for any ad-hoc childcare/family/caring needs
• 10 days Annual Leave Buy-Back scheme - for if you’d like some additional time off
• 12 weeks paid Maternity Leave and 4 weeks paid Paternity Leave for employees with over 12 months service
• Special Leave for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments
• Paid leave to volunteer
• 10 days Work from Abroad policy
• Brand new equipment - from the latest Apple MacBooks to 34” curved monitors at Wagestream HQ
• Salary sacrifice to pension, as well as bonus exchange to Pension: reap even more rewards of any bonus by paying into your pension & save on Tax and NI + added compound growth
• The best benefit of all, access to Wagestream!
• Access to Salary Sacrifice Schemes via ThanksBen: THE Benefits marketplace. Choose the benefits you want, when you want. Pay less tax, receive more value 🎉

Including:

• Additional Pension Payments
• Workplace nurseries
• Cycle to Work
• Tech Scheme
• Healthcare cash plans, etc

At Wagestream we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Wagestream is an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, or veteran status.