Director of Data Infrastructure, Kiavi
$207.3-310.9k
+ 20% bonus + equity
AWS
Kubernetes
Kafka
Airflow
Kubeflow
Snowflake
Sagemaker
Drift
DevOps
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area
1 day a week in office
Simplifying the financing process for real estate projects
Be an early applicant
Simplifying the financing process for real estate projects
201-500 employees
B2CPropertyReal EstateSaaS
Be an early applicant
$207.3-310.9k
+ 20% bonus + equity
AWS
Kubernetes
Kafka
Airflow
Kubeflow
Snowflake
Sagemaker
Drift
DevOps
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area
1 day a week in office
201-500 employees
B2CPropertyReal EstateSaaS
Company mission
Kiavi's mission is to bring technology-driven and innovative products and services to real estate investors.
Role
Who you are
- 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!
What the job involves
- We are now aggressively doubling down on this strategy, to achieve this, we are seeking a seasoned Director of Engineering to lead Data Infrastructure, MLOps, and data support efforts for teams relying on data
- As the leader of our world-class team of Data Engineers and MLOps engineers, you will be at the center of this transformation
- You are responsible for building the platform for powering Kiavi's AI strategy and will directly contribute to the acceleration of using Data/AI/ML towards changing the way we do lending
- Your primary mission is to build the Data and AI/ML Foundation to enable all of Kiavi's Data and AI/ML initiatives through a highly available, modern Data Stack
- The ideal candidate will have real-world experience in building Data and AI/ML Platforms with proven expertise in managing both Data Engineering and MLOps architecture
- This includes hands-on experience in Data Pipelines, Data Analytics, traditional ML and modern Gen AI capabilities
- You will play a pivotal role in building upon Kiavi’s past achievements, leveling up the team with your best practices, and delivering the next wave of AI-driven success for Kiavi
- 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)
Our take
Whether flipping or renting houses, real estate investors often require quick financing to close a transaction. Kiavi (previously LendingHome) is a lending company that focuses exclusively on lending to real estate investors, with an automated platform that makes use of machine learning and predictive-analytics to help prevent investors overstretching.
The company has grown to become one of the leading lenders to real estate investors in the country. The company has provided more than $13 billion in funded loans.
An impressive debt funding round of $300 million in early 2025 comes off the back of a 46% year-over-year loan-marking increase in 2024. Despite a slow housing market, the company is well set to help revitalize the $25 trillion worth of aged US housing stock to help ensure housing for millions of Americans.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
-18% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Dec 2020
$75m
SERIES E
Oct 2017
$57m
SERIES C
Total funding: $241.2m
Company benefits
- Lunch & snacks
- Paid parental leave
- Commuter benefits
- Equity
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Flexible PTO
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Arvind Mohan
(CEO)Began working for the company in 2016 as the Chief Operating Officer until being promoted to CEO in Feb 2023. Former Director of Securitized Products Trading at Barclays.
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