Head of Data Infrastructure

Kiavi, formerly known as LendingHome, is one of the largest lenders to real estate investors in the United States. With Kiavi’s technology platform and innovative financing solutions, real estate investors are empowered to make informed decisions, close deals faster, and realize the full potential of their real estate investment strategies.

 

The Team 

Founded in 2013, Kiavi is committed to helping customers revitalize approximately $25 trillion worth of aged U.S. housing stock and provide move-in ready homes and rental housing for millions of Americans across the country.  We have funded $7.8 billion dollars worth of loans across about 35,000+ projects, becoming one of the nation's largest bridge loan lenders. 

Combining our technology and industry expertise, Kiavi has grown to a team of over 400 and has won many awards over the years including Forbes Fintech 50, Finovate Awards: Best Digital Mortgage Platform, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and many more. 

Loans funded: More than $7.8 billion

Geography: Lends in 27 states plus Washington, D.C., which account for more than 80% of the nation’s real estate market

Homes financed: About 35,000

Principal and interest returned to investors: More than $5.18 billion

Employees: Over 400 employees

This position can be based anywhere in the United States—remote or in-office. Our hybrid distributed workforce philosophy allows us to find the best talent in the country and build diverse teams, while allowing our colleagues to work from the location that works best for them. For those who prefer to work in-office, we have locations in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. We also plan to use these spaces to bring together teammates to drive creativity and innovation.

 

The Role

Kiavi is reimagining the full lifecycle of a real estate investor (REI) from the ground up with data at the core of everything we do. This includes enabling the REI to make data driven decisions regarding their next project: determining the type and scope of project, sourcing a property, financing it and more. As the Head of Data Infrastructure, you will lead multiple teams of data architects, data and machine learning engineers, and data analysts responsible for building highly scalable capabilities across the data platform. 

We anticipate having at least three teams within the Data Infrastructure team with approximately 15 data engineers and analysts. Each of these teams will have dedicated team leads. 

• ETL Team: responsible for bulk data ingestion, third party vendor APIs, pipeline health monitoring, data aggregation, and data modeling within the warehouse. This team will also expand accessibility for the rest of the business to our datasets, in order to make the company even more data-driven.
• MLOps Team: responsible for deploying an ever increasing number of ML models into production. This team is also responsible for optimizing the models, A/B testing candidate models, inference testing on a variety of hardware, monitoring model performance, and model drift monitoring. This team will implement or adopt a feature store to be used for our online and offline models and also be responsible for monitoring our data quality. 
• Application Integration Team: responsible for the eventing framework to generate events from our applications into the data warehouse and all associated data stream processing. This team is also responsible for building out an API for accessing the data warehouse from online applications and also for getting data back out of our data warehouse into other third party business applications. 

First, you will be responsible for growing the team from 4-5 engineers to approximately 15. You will orchestrate and influence architectural direction and design patterns. You will be responsible for designing and managing robust and scalable data engineering solutions. You will implement/optimize the data architecture and implement standards and engineering patterns. You will also be responsible for maintaining consistent delivery of accurate data to cross-functional stakeholders.

 

Responsibilities

• Deliver strong and visionary leadership to your team, enhance and develop a strong data culture and commitment to impact the business positively.
• Recruit, lead, and inspire Data and Machine Learning engineers. 
• Manage through team leads and eventually managers. 
• Develop, communicate, and evangelize the next-gen data platform vision and roadmap for highly scalable, resilient, and efficient streaming data infrastructure systems. 
• Build MLOps infrastructure for operationalizing AI / ML analytics and ensure solutions are delivered efficiently, predictably, and sustainably.
• Implement large-scale data ETL ecosystems including data management and governance
• Lead troubleshooting of process workflows, applications, integrations and architectural challenges leveraging the expertise of your team.

 

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software development with at least 4+ years of experience as an engineering manager. 
• Prior experience managing through managers or team leads. 
• Kind and intellectually mature. 
• Hands on experience with building modern data pipelines. 
• Experience creating robust, scalable data infrastructure. 
• Strong written, spoken communication, negotiation and leadership skills. 
• Excited to partner with cross-functional stakeholders like Product Management, Data Science, Accounting and others throughout the business. 
• Focus on maximizing impact for yourself, your team and LendingHome as a whole. 
• Equipped with the intelligence, empathy, integrity and technical chops required to quickly earn the trust of a strong technical team. 
• Able to handle ambiguity - you can figure out what needs to be done and then do it.

 

Benefits and Perks 

• Product Ownership: All employees think like an owner because all employees own equity in the company and play a critical role in making our business great.
• Health Insurance: Our medical, dental, and vision plans are completely free for employee-only coverage, and the company pays 80% of the total premium for dependents.
• Whole-Person Wellness: Anyone can schedule no-cost unlimited virtual therapy sessions, use a monthly subsidy for fitness facilities, and access reimbursements for fertility services.
• Retirement Savings. Employees who participate in our “no fee” 401(k) receive an immediately-vested 
• employer match on 100% of contributions up to 3% of compensation. 
• Career Growth: We foster an environment that encourages opportunities to use your voice, do better for our customers and each other, and support your career journey.
• Flexible Time Off: With no cap on the number of days of PTO each year, employees are encouraged to enjoy a well-rounded lifestyle with work, travel, and family.
• Paid Leaves: You’re immediately eligible for up to 12 weeks of paid leave each year to bond with a new child (mothers & fathers) and up to 8 weeks for medical or caregiver leave so you come back ready to deliver high-impact results.
• Remote-First: We win together while still being fully remote, and each employee receives a stipend for 
• their home office setup and a monthly allowance to help with the cost of internet/phone.

 

Kiavi in the News:

Forbes: The Future Of Real Estate: Fintech 50 2019 and Real Estate on a Threshold of a “Moneyball” Moment

HousingWire:  2019 HW Tech100 Winner: LendingHome

Pittsburgh Business Times: Voted a “2019 Best Places to Work” and won first runner-up in large company category

Mortgage Professional America: LendingHome surpasses $5 billion in loans in five years

Pittsburgh Business Times: San Francisco fintech aggressively expands, looks to hire in Pittsburgh

Curbed: How Wall Street, Silicon Valley Institutionalized Home Flipping