Lead Data Engineer (FinTech, Digital Banking, or Payments domain)

Job Title: Lead Data Engineer

Location: Denver CO (Onsite)

Type: Contract

________________________________________

We are seeking a **Data Catalog & Governance Specialist** to support our **Send Money / Payments platform**, ensuring robust metadata management, data lineage visibility, and regulatory-grade governance across transactional and customer data domains.

This role is critical in establishing transparency and trust across payment flows, customer onboarding data, compliance datasets (KYC/AML), and reporting pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

• Configure and administer enterprise **data catalog platforms** to support payment and transaction data domains
• Define and manage **business and technical metadata** for:
• Transaction data
• Customer/KYC data
• Beneficiary and wallet data
• Payment status and settlement data
• Establish and maintain **end-to-end data lineage** across:
• Send Money application
• Middleware/API layers
• Data warehouse and reporting systems
• Partner with data engineering teams to monitor and document **ETL/ELT pipelines** supporting payment processing
• Perform and document **data quality assessments** for critical financial datasets
• Define and enforce **data governance policies**, including:
• Data classification (PII, financial data, sensitive fields)
• Access control and role-based permissions
• Retention and audit requirements
• Support regulatory and compliance needs (AML, audit trails, transaction monitoring)
• Drive enterprise-wide adoption of the data catalog across business, risk, compliance, and engineering teams
• Lead metadata onboarding workshops and training sessions

Required Skills & Experience

• Hands-on experience with **data catalog and metadata management tools** (e.g., Collibra, Alation, Informatica EDC, Microsoft Purview, Atlan, etc.)
• Strong understanding of:
• Data modeling (transactional and analytical models)
• Data lineage and impact analysis
• Data quality frameworks and monitoring
• ETL/ELT processes in financial systems
• Experience working with **transaction-heavy systems or payment platforms**
• Proficiency in **SQL** and familiarity with **Python scripting**
• Understanding of data privacy and financial regulatory controls

* Experience supporting audit and compliance reporting

Preferred (Highly Desirable)

• Experience in **FinTech, Digital Banking, or Payments domain**
• Exposure to Send Money / Remittance / Wallet-based applications
• Familiarity with KYC, AML, fraud detection, and transaction monitoring data flows
• Experience working with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Azure, AWS, etc.)

Soft Skills

• Strong stakeholder communication across product, risk, compliance, and engineering
• Ability to translate technical metadata into business-understandable definitions
• Strong organizational and documentation discipline
• Experience driving data governance adoption initiatives
• Ability to operate in a regulated, high-availability environment