Data Engineering Lead

As a Data Engineering Lead at Plasma, you build the company's data function from the ground up as the first dedicated data hire. You work across Consumer, Payments and Business to create one trusted view of users, money and operations. At first you build much of the platform yourself: the Snowflake warehouse, the pipelines that feed it and the modelled layer on top. As the function grows, you choose the tools, set the standards and hire the team.

What you'll do

• 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

What you bring

• 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
• Comfort 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
• The ability to turn analysis into decisions, explaining findings to non-technical leaders in a few sentences and telling them what to do about it
• Clear communication, clean tested code, and the ability to lead through technical decisions
• Very high agency: you find the problems that matter without waiting to be told which to work on

Nice to have

• Experience as an early or founding data hire at a fast-growing fintech
• Hands-on experience with real money data at a fintech: payments, cards, ledgers, settlement, chargebacks or FX
• 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 we offer

• Above-market salary for the role level, with token compensation
• A beautiful London HQ with gym access and daily food
• 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 for gym, therapy, sauna, massage or similar
• 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 and moving millions of dollars every day

About Plasma

Plasma is building the primary account for global money. Its first product, Plasma One, is a global money account where people and businesses can receive, hold and 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.