Senior Data Engineer

About Bits:

Bits is a fast-growing fintech startup based in London. We are dedicated to promoting financial inclusion and providing credit building solutions to individuals who have been overlooked by mainstream lenders. With the support of renowned investors, we have quickly gained traction and currently serve over 300,000 customers across the UK.

About the Role:

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to join our team. As our first data engineer, you will play a crucial role in scaling our data infrastructure and enabling real-time, data-driven decision-making. Your primary responsibility will be designing and maintaining robust NoSQL database solutions that can handle high transaction volumes, providing low-latency, high availability, and ensuring smooth integration with our applications. You'll work closely with our engineering team to create data solutions that help us provide seamless services to our users.

Responsibilities:

• Build our data foundation: Lead the design, development, and optimization of NoSQL databases (e.g. DynamoDB) to handle large volumes of data from multiple sources (e.g. customer applications, credit card transactions).
• Data-driven decision-making: Enable real-time and batch processing of customer and credit data to support product development, risk management, and responsible lending decisions.
• Collaborate across teams: Work closely with product, risk management, customer service, and compliance teams to ensure that data is available, clean, and actionable for business operations.
• Optimize and scale: Build systems that scale with Bits' growth as we expand our customer base and data complexity, optimizing for performance, cost, and efficiency.
• Data governance and security: Ensure data systems comply with regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR) and uphold data privacy and security best practices.
• Support risk and underwriting: Develop tools and processes to streamline data access for our underwriting team, providing them with accurate and timely data for credit risk assessments.
• Automation and reporting: Work on automation of key data workflows and support data analytics teams by ensuring self-service capabilities for business intelligence reporting.
• Be a key decision-maker: As a founding engineer, you will have significant input into the architecture, technology stack, and data strategy.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in designing scalable, robust relational and non-relational database architectures
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and big data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka).
• Proficient in SQL, but also highly skilled in non-relational database querying and manipulation.
• Experience with ETL frameworks that handle both real-time and batch processing.
• Programming proficiency in languages like Python or Java for data processing tasks and automation.
• Expertise in data security, encryption, and handling compliance requirements
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.ring, or a related field.
• Prior experience in the FinTech industry is a plus.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in the fintech industry or a deep understanding of credit-building
• products. 
• Experience with business intelligence BI tools like Looker, Omni, or similar
• Familiarity with machine learning pipelines and model deployment.

Benefits:

• A competitive market salary
• 28 days holidays/ year incl. UK/ England public & bank holidays
• Free fruit in the office
• Regular team meals