Kiavi · 3 hours ago
Director, Data Infrastructure
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$207K/yr - $311K/yr
10+ years expKiavi is one of the nation’s largest private lenders to residential real estate investors, leveraging data and technology to streamline access to capital. The Director of Data Infrastructure will lead a team focused on building a modern data stack to support Kiavi's AI and ML initiatives, ensuring efficient data management and driving the technical strategy for the company's data platform.
Financial ServicesFinTechLendingReal EstateReal Estate Investment
Responsibilities
Lead & Mentor a high-performing, skilled, Data Engineering and MLOps team including engineers, senior technical program manager and other technical staff. You'll be responsible for hiring, coaching, and mentoring, with a strong emphasis on developing the careers of your engineers
Foster Team and Career Development: Formalize and champion career growth across the Data Infrastructure and MLOps teams. Ensure every team member has a clear career path and an active development plan
Drive Technical Strategy & Vision: You will lead the collaborative development of the technical vision and roadmap for our Data and AI/ML platform. You'll partner closely with senior leaders across Risk, Data Analytics, Data Science, and Product Management to co-define the strategy, ensuring it is context-aware of Kiavi's size, capacity, and product needs to drive organization-wide adoption. You will also serve as an "operational steward" for the data stack, prioritizing core infrastructure and maintainability. Your ultimate goal is to build a scaled, efficient, and well-governed platform founded on reproducibility, explainability, bias elimination, and sustainability for all AI/ML initiatives
Platform Architecture & Scalability: Work closely with architecture specialists on the team to ensure Kiavi has a scalable core data platform that meets business needs. Identify and prioritize hidden tech debt in the stack that lowers engineer and stakeholder productivity. See that data is efficiently captured, processed, stored, and made accessible across the organization. Drive evolution of the multi-warehouse ecosystem (Snowflake and Databricks) to provide a reliable, high-performance foundation for analytics, machine learning, and business decision-making
Foster Customer-Centricity: Support customer-facing initiatives and internal data-dependent teams with a customer orientation. Communicate the “Why” and make certain the platform and infrastructure are built and managed to directly meet customer and internal stakeholder requirements for speed, reliability, and data quality
Execute with Excellence: Lead your team in delivering complex, large scale projects where availability, accuracy and security are critical. This includes hands-on technical design, code reviews, and scalable architecture guidance. You will also oversee the data infrastructure layer that powers analytics and AI, ensuring seamless data movement, orchestration, and integration with core engineering systems
Align Business and Infrastructure Needs: Drive adoption of tooling and governance by being the champion for ensuring business stakeholder input is integrated into all major infrastructure choices
Accountability and Ownership: Define and ensure clear ownership and prioritization processes across Data Infrastructure and MLOps to eliminate ambiguity and ensure timely resolution of cross-functional requests. You will institute effective capacity planning that correctly reflects prioritized business needs and guarantees a reliable mechanism for completing small, high-value tasks alongside larger strategic initiatives. You will partner closely with Engineering and DevOps to ensure end-to-end reliability and operational alignment among data pipelines, applications, and platform services
Own the Full Lifecycle: You will lead the end-to-end execution of your team's roadmap, from initial planning and milestone definition with Technical Program Management / Product Management, to co-developing OKRs, managing timelines, communicating risk, and collaborating with key stakeholders throughout
Value Realization & Cost Optimization: Ensure Kiavi has a structured process and data for real-time cost measurement. Articulate the quantified value proposition of infrastructure investments to leadership and business partners. Prioritize investments based on clear ROI and business impact, while strategically reducing spend on low-value initiatives
Operational Monitoring and Governance: Lead the team to build and implement robust monitoring beyond basic uptime, specifically focusing on model drift/decay and performance feedback loops to assess the ongoing health and risk level of production models
Optimize for Speed through Stability: Champion an approach where compliance, risk management, and infosec are built into all processes, embedding scalable solutions and guardrails that protect regulatory integrity and security without slowing delivery. Ensure that foundational platform work that minimizes technical debt drives the roadmap, enabling the team to maintain high velocity and rapidly adapt to new business needs
Champion Quality: Set and maintain a high bar for engineering and operational quality, with a sharp focus on the compliance and correctness required in our lending systems. You'll leverage customer and system data to iterate and improve our products rapidly
Resource Allocation & SDLC: Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure their needs are captured during planning cycles and provide dedicated or rotational support for teams relying on data infrastructure. Work with Technical Program Manager to drive predictable delivery timelines. Operate with standardized SDLC practices so that models, data and systems are auditable and reproducible by default (rather than by request)
Qualification
Required
Proven Data and AI/ML Leadership: You have successfully led a team in building and shipping production Data and MLOps/LLMOps Infrastructure to achieve concrete business goals
Scaled Platform Experience: You have experience leading platform teams at a medium-to-large company, demonstrating the ability to transition from scrappy builds to a scaled, mature platform that supports diverse AI/ML use cases across multiple business functions (e.g., Risk, Data Science, Revenue teams)
Technical Depth: You are a former data or ML engineer and not afraid to 'dive deep.' You can comfortably lead technical design discussions, review code, and challenge your team on technical trade-offs. You are an active, hands-on technical leader who maintains deep fluency in the platform's architecture and implementation details. You have used industry-leading Data and AI/ML systems such as Databricks, Snowflake, AWS SageMaker, Kubeflow, etc. You are proficient in understanding data pipelines, addressing latency, and communicating best practices for tools such as Airflow, Dagster, etc. You have experience in building highly available systems using Kubernetes, Kafka, etc
You are familiar with modern LLM evaluation, telemetry and observability platforms (e.g., Langfuse, MLflow, LangGraph, or equivalents), and understand how to leverage these tools to manage model performance, cost, and safety in production
You have some experience integrating and managing data systems with specialized frameworks such as MCP (Model Context Protocol), or other proprietary/niche model evaluation and telemetry tools
You are open to understanding the system's 'guts' as a 'player-coach' and may occasionally write a query, script, or build a prototype to demonstrate technical direction or unblock a critical path
People Leadership: You are an exceptional people manager who knows how to attract, develop, and retain top talent. You see mentorship and curiosity as important parts of your leadership role, and you regularly seek feedback from your reports and your peers to build trust and become a better leader. You are adept at setting Director-level strategy while maintaining a high degree of accountability for execution, ensuring important tasks and critical decisions within your purview are handled effectively without excessive delegation
Collaborative Decision-Making: Demonstrated ability to solicit, synthesize, and incorporate diverse technical and business viewpoints into strategic decisions, fostering a 'Disagree and Commit' culture and driving disciplined decision-making through clear role definition and streamlined cross-functional processes
Execution: You have a track record of delivering complex, large-scale projects in a dynamic, fast-paced business environment
Clear Communication: You can clearly articulate a vision, create alignment, and communicate technical and business risks to stakeholders at all levels. You communicate well within your cross functional team, with stakeholders, and across cross-functional teams that depend on your team's output
Experience: You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 5+ years in a direct people management role
B.S. degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience)
No real-estate or mortgage experience is needed, but a hunger to learn our business is!
Benefits
Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance: Kiavi offers free employee-only coverage for medical, dental, and vision plans. Dependents receive a heavily discounted premium, competitively placed in the 90th percentile for cost.
Health Savings Account (HSA): For those enrolled in a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), Kiavi provides an annual employer contribution to HSAs: $1,000 for individual coverage and $2,000 for dependents.
Disability and Life Insurance: Immediate access to short-term and long-term disability insurance, as well as group life and AD&D insurance, with coverage at 1x annual salary.
Remote Work Policy: Kiavi supports working remotely for day to day activities for most roles and occasionally may ask employees to gather in person for key meetings, training, team building etc. For remote workers, Kiavi offers a one-time office setup reimbursement of up to $500 and a monthly $85 stipend for internet and phone expenses. For in-office workers, Kiavi offers employer contributions to commuter benefits account, either for parking or public transportation.
Flexible Time Off: Employees are empowered to manage their own time off, with no strict limits, as long as it's approved by their manager.
Paid Leaves: Up to 8 weeks of paid leave for medical or caregiver purposes, and 12 weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave. Short-term disability leave is also available for birthing mothers.
401(k) & Company Match: A 401(k) plan managed by Fidelity, with Kiavi matching 100% of contributions up to 3% of compensation or $8,000 (whichever is less). All employer contributions are immediately vested.
Company
Kiavi
Kiavi is a tech-enabled lender that provides residential real estate investors with financing solutions for property investments.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Kiavi has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2024 (1)
2023 (2)
2022 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$1.5BKey Investors
Benefit Street PartnersMoatableRibbit Capital
2025-08-26Debt Financing· $400M
2025-02-13Debt Financing· $300M
2024-10-16Debt Financing· $400M
Leadership Team
James Herbert
Co-Founder, Board Member
Tim Lawlor
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
HousingWire.com
2025-12-18
2025-11-11
Company data provided by crunchbase