Data Engineering Lead
About this role
About Plasma
Plasma is building the primary account for global money.
Money used to belong to a country. Increasingly, it belongs to a person or business moving through many countries. People and businesses now earn, spend, save, hire and invest across borders. Traditional banks cannot serve this new world.
Our first product, Plasma One, is a global money account: a place to receive, hold, send funds in seconds, earn yield and spend with a card in the local economy.
Underneath is the Plasma network, built from first principles for stablecoin payments. Stablecoins make dollars faster, cheaper and more reliable to move.
The opportunity is to become where all global money lands first: where income arrives, balances grow, payments move, businesses operate, and new financial products are built.
The Team & Our Story
We are a global team of founders, operators and engineers, obsessed with building the best products. We work at the cutting edge of financial innovation, using stablecoins to create tools for consumers and businesses.
We operate with trust, clarity, and ambition: own your craft, move with urgency, contribute beyond your lane, back your teammates, debate rigorously, and keep raising the bar for what great means.
The Role
We're looking for a hands-on Data Lead to build Plasma's data function from the ground up. You'll be our first dedicated data hire, working across Consumer, Payments and Business to give the company one trusted view of its users, its money and its operations.
At first you'll build much of the platform yourself: our Snowflake warehouse, the pipelines that feed it and the modelled layer on top. As the function grows, you'll choose the tools, set the standards and hire the team.
The Work
Own Plasma's data platform end to end: the Snowflake warehouse, ingestion from production systems and third-party providers, and the modelled layer the rest of the company builds on
Define the metrics the company runs on, including funded users, activation, engagement, balances, spend and retention, and make sure every team uses the same definitions
Partner with Consumer to understand how users behave across regions, segments and products, and turn that into specific product decisions
Design and analyse experiments, and be clear about when a result is real and when it isn't
Work with Payments and finance so the business can trust its numbers: reconciliation across ledgers, providers and banking partners, revenue reporting and unit economics
Find fraudulent and abusive patterns across onboarding, funding, card spend and transfers, and build the signals and rules that let risk and operations act on them
Treat data quality, testing, access control and PII handling as part of the platform, not an afterthought
Choose tools deliberately, set standards for the function and hire the team as Plasma scales
The Bar
A senior, hands-on data practitioner with a track record of both building a data platform and using it
Deep SQL and data modelling skills, with enough engineering range to build and run production pipelines yourself
Comfortable starting from very little, and building something that still makes sense when the team is five times bigger
Strong judgment on tradeoffs: speed vs. rigour, build vs. buy, a quick answer now vs. a reusable model later
You turn analysis into decisions. You can explain a finding to a non-technical leader in a few sentences and tell them what to do about it
You communicate clearly, write clean, tested code, and lead through technical decisions whether or not you're managing people yet
You have very high agency. You don't wait to be told which problem to work on; you go and find the ones that matter
Nice to have
You've been an early or founding data hire at a fast-growing fintech
Experience with real money data at a fintech: payments, cards, ledgers, settlement, chargebacks or FX. You know the ways financial data goes wrong
Hands-on fraud, risk or financial-crime analytics
Familiarity with stablecoins and on-chain data, including how blockchain transactions map to accounts, balances and ledgers
Experience hiring and growing a data team
Machine learning in production for fraud, risk or personalisation
What's in it for you
Above-market salary for the level of the role, with token compensation.
A beautiful London HQ with gym access and daily food, for those who thrive in an office environment. Visa sponsorship and relocation support if you're joining from abroad.
Premium health insurance for you and your family, fully covered by Plasma.
Monthly wellness budget, whether that's the gym, therapy, sauna, or massage.
All the tools and tech you need to operate at your best.
Real ownership and responsibility from day one, with your work shipping to hundreds of thousands of people, moving millions of dollars every day.
Data Protection & Privacy
We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data. Any personal information you provide during the recruitment process will be processed in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and applicable local data protection laws.
Compensation Range: $180K - $300K
Originally posted on Himalayas