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Tala is an AI-native credit infrastructure platform serving the global majority, having distributed over $7 billion in capital to 13+ million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The company combines proprietary risk intelligence with a network of capital and distribution partners to power credit access at scale.
You will be the senior technical leader responsible for making Tala's data easier to trust, understand, access, and use across the organization. This is a highly hands-on technical leadership role where you define architecture and technical direction for shared data and analytics platforms while building alongside engineers.
Key responsibilities include:
**Own Data Platform Architecture**: Define technical architecture for Tala's semantic layer and shared analytics platform. Establish consistent, governed definitions for business metrics across markets and teams. Determine how data and metrics should be stored, modeled, accessed, and consumed across BI tools, notebooks, applications, and AI agents. Make architectural decisions balancing scalability, reliability, usability, governance, and regulatory requirements. Set technical priorities and sequencing for major platform initiatives.
**Build, Don't Just Architect**: Design and build production data models, pipelines, services, tooling, SDKs, and platform components. Partner closely with Analytics Engineering and Data Infrastructure as a senior technical contributor. Take ownership of specific platform capabilities from concept through production. Identify and eliminate technical debt and architectural bottlenecks. Establish reusable patterns and standards.
**Build AI-Native Analytics**: Define how the Analytics organization can effectively use AI in workflows including development, analysis, testing, documentation, and data exploration. Build the context and governance layer enabling AI agents to safely work with trusted business metrics. Establish standards and best practices for AI across analytics and data workflows. Move AI initiatives from experimentation into reliable, adopted tools.
**Drive Cross-Functional Data Initiatives**: Lead technical initiatives spanning Product, Engineering, Analytics, Finance, and Accounting. Bring clarity to ambiguous problems and drive technical decisions to completion. Unblock teams by resolving dependencies and architectural questions. Partner with Finance and Accounting on financial and business metrics reconciliation. Build relationships and influence without formal authority.
**Raise the Technical Bar**: Provide technical mentorship through design reviews, pairing, and collaboration. Establish engineering and data architecture standards. Improve documentation. Create a culture where governance, reliability, and usability are built into data products.
Initially an individual contributor position with no direct reports, operating at Principal/Staff-level scope. As the platform organization grows, there will be opportunity to build and lead a team.
**Requirements:**
- Significant experience in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, data platforms, or related technical field
- Experience designing and building large-scale or shared data platforms and infrastructure
- Strong experience with data architecture, data modeling, pipelines, and production systems
- Track record of making complex architectural decisions and translating them into working systems
- Ability and willingness to write production code and build alongside engineers
- Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to bring ambiguous or stalled initiatives to completion
- Excellent communication skills to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Highly valuable: experience establishing trusted, governed, or standardized business metrics
- Strong plus: experience with AI/LLM-powered analytics, data workflows, or agents
- Plus: experience working with financial, regulated, or highly sensitive data
