Lead Data Architect, GoFundMe
$253.5-380.5k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
Social fundraising platform
Be an early applicant
Social fundraising platform
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$253.5-380.5k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To help people fundraise for the personal, business, and charitable causes that matter most to them.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of experience in data architecture, platform engineering, or data engineering, with at least 3+ in a senior or architect role
- Proven expertise with modern cloud-native data stacks including Snowflake, Databricks, MDM, Data Catalogs and CDPs
- Hands-on experience with Looker or other BI/semantic modeling tools
- Strong understanding of graph-based data models, recommendation systems, and personalization architectures
- Expertise in data modeling, metadata management, and semantic layers
- Proficiency with streaming/event-driven data pipelines and real-time processing (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Spark Streaming, etc.)
- Familiarity with AI/ML pipelines, feature stores, and unstructured/structured data integration
- Strong foundation in data governance, lineage, cataloging, and compliance frameworks
- Excellent communication and leadership skills to align technical direction across diverse teams
What the job involves
- We are seeking a Lead Data Architect to join our Data Platform team
- This role will be pivotal in modernizing our existing platform and building out a scalable data, reporting and AI architecture to provide scale, enhance product offerings, and meet new business requirements
- You will design the blueprint for a modern cloud-native data ecosystem, ensuring it is robust, secure, and future-ready
- By establishing standards, optimizing performance, and partnering cross-functionally, you will enable GoFundMe to harness data as a strategic asset that powers insights, innovation, and growth
- Modernize, optimize and evolve a cloud-native data stack into a scalable, secure and high performing ecosystem such as SQL & NoSQL repositories for diverse workloads
- Leverage modern data platform principles including lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh architectures to improve scalability, decentralization, governance, and interoperability
- Design Scalable Architectures: Build flexible architectures to support analytics, real-time reporting, AI/ML Ops pipelines, feature stores, and graph-based data relationships
- Unified Data Platform: Design high performing and cost effective solutions that handle both structured and unstructured data at high volume and high velocity
- Establish Modeling Standards: Define enterprise-wide standards for data modeling, semantic layers, and golden datasets to enable consistency and reuse
- Advance Governance & Quality: Implement frameworks for data lineage, quality, privacy, and security (GDPR, CCPA, PII protections)
- Enable Personalization & Insights: Architect data capabilities that fuel advanced recommendations, relationship mapping, and connected user experiences
- Evaluate & Integrate Technologies: Guide adoption of best-fit technologies to support evolving use cases in data science, AI, and scalable analytics
- Partner Cross-Functionally: Collaborate with engineering, product, analytics, and data science teams to translate business vision into technical solutions
- Mentor & Lead: Provide architectural leadership, coaching engineers on best practices while influencing strategic platform decisions.
Our take
One of the most well-known fundraising platforms in the world, GoFundMe makes raising money online exceptionally easy. The platform started initially with a focus on charity and good causes, but its scope has now expanded to include start-up business funding. What makes the platform attractive is its ability to democratize fundraising through the medium of online.
GoFundMe's rapid rise in popularity has been helped by its social media integrations and the speed at which individuals can start funds. With strategic foresight, the company launched its GoFundMe Guarantee in 2016, a pledge to protect donors from fraud or platform misuse - knowing that its continued growth could only be hampered by security issues or donor deception.
This guarantee is what has enabled the company to remain the largest crowdfunding platform in the world. Notably, it stands amongst the likes of Airbnb, Facebook, and Netflix in being backed by tech investors TCV.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Wide range of health insurance options, including medical, dental, and vision (GoFundMe covers 100% of employee premiums, and 80% of spouse and dependents)
- $600 annual fitness and wellness reimbursement
- Weekly massages
- Standing desks
- Fully-stocked kitchens & daily lunches
- Team off-sites & monthly social events
- Many of our offices are dog friendly
- 10 paid holidays, 17 days of accrued vacation per year, unlimited sick time & three volunteer days
- Enhanced parental leaves
- $50/month for employees commuting to and from work (public transit and/or parking)
- Caltrain GoPasses for our Bay Area commuters
- "Gives Back" program, where employees nominate fundraisers weekly for donations from GoFundMe
- Quarterly volunteer events in each office to give back to our local communities
- 401(k) retirement plan with company matching
- Access to learning tools and resources, including a subscription to Udemy, guest speakers, and internal brown bag sessions
Company HQ
Centennial, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Margaret Richardson
(Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, not founder)Formerly worked at Airbnb as Vice President of Trust and Director of Global Policy. They worked in Trust & Safety at Apple prior to becoming a Member of Pipeline Angels.
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