Data Engineer

About Column

For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The opportunity:

As Column’s first Data Engineer, you’ll lay the foundation for our entire data platform, which is built on the world’s most advanced, in-house banking core and processes trillions of dollars of payments annually. You’ll be responsible for building and scaling the pipelines and infrastructure that power internal analytics, compliance reporting, and customer insights. You’ll work closely with engineering, compliance, risk, and operations teams to design systems that are fast, reliable, and auditable from day one. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role for someone who’s excited about building clean systems that power a regulated institution at scale.

This role reports directly to our CEO as a member of our engineering team, and is an in-person role located in our Presidio-based, San Francisco office (3-4 days/week) - we will support relocation for the right candidate.

Read more about Life @ Column and our hiring process here.

What you’ll do:

• Design and own Column’s data infrastructure and ETL pipelines

• Partner with product and infra teams to define eventing strategy and log structure

• Build tools for internal users (Finance, Risk, Compliance, Ops) to self-serve critical data

• Own data models and warehouse architecture across core banking systems

• Ensure data quality, observability, and regulatory compliance (e.g., audit trails)

• Define best practices for analytics engineering and scalable reporting

What you’ll need to be successful:

• 5+ years of experience as a data or software engineer, ideally at a startup or high-growth fintech

• Experience designing and maintaining data pipelines in production

• Strong fluency with SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language (e.g., Python, Go)

• A bias toward simplicity, with a track record of building maintainable systems

• Understanding of data privacy and security best practices in a regulated environment

• Bonus: experience with banking/financial systems, compliance reporting, or financial modeling

What you’ll get from us:

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 100% covered for your dependents!

• Comprehensive family planning and fertility benefits via partnership with Carrot, including reimbursement of up to $20,000 in qualified expenses

• Up to $2,000 (post-tax) monthly rent subsidy for employees living within 2 miles of Column’s office

• FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses

• 401k plan, including self-directed brokerage options

• Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge

• 100% paid parental leave, including 16 weeks for birth mothers, 12 weeks for primary caregivers, and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers

• Up to $4,500 in annual reimbursements for backup childcare

• Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees

• Commuter benefits, including paid transportation to-and-from the office

• Regular team building events, including annual offsite

Pay transparency:

Compensation packages at Column include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

The annual US base salary range for this role is $150,000-$180,000 + equity.

We look forward to hearing from you

Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please reach out to accommodations@column.com.

We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify program here.