Founding Data Lead

Job description

**Mission** Skip is building the fastest, most intelligent home loan platform in Australia - and we increasingly run on data: credit performance, acquisition economics, settlements and servicing, and the numbers our board, warehouse funders and regulators rely on. This is our **first dedicated data hire**. The job is to turn raw, ingested data from a wide array of sources into trusted, decision-ready answers - and to build the modelling discipline so those numbers stay trustworthy as we scale many times over. **About the role** We’re hiring the person who, faced with a new business question, instinctively asks: *how do we model this once, test it, and make it self-serve?* - and then builds the clean, tested data models and shared definitions that make the answer obvious to everyone - whether querying and interpreting from a dashboard or from an agent chat. A **founding generalist** who is genuinely disciplined at modelling *and* a strong, business-literate communicator and the founding owner of a function we expect to grow - you may build and lead the data team that follows. You will own three parts that most companies split across two or three people: - **The ingestion layer** - the pipelines that land raw data from our source systems into Snowflake reliably and on time, so everything downstream is built on complete, fresh data. - **The model layer** - the transformation, dimensional modelling, testing and documentation that turn raw Snowflake data into clean, reconciled, business-ready tables (dbt-style: staging → intermediate → marts). - **The analysis** - partnering with all teams and Execs to answer the questions that actually move the business, and turning the numbers into decisions. The thread connecting them is the same: **make the trusted number the easy number.** You measure your success not by how many dashboards are shipped, but by how many decisions get made confidently on numbers people trust. **The opportunity** We are a small, high-talent-density team scaling our business with technology. The companies that win this phase keep their teams small and their leverage high. Data is usually where that breaks: trust erodes, every team defines metrics differently, and answering a simple question turns into a week of reconciliation. The opportunity here is to prove the opposite - that one excellent person, building the right models and definitions early, can give the whole business trusted, self-serve answers while the team stays lean. **Key Responsibilities** - Own the data stack end to end - from ingesting raw source data into Snowflake through to the clean, reconciled, business-ready models the whole company relies on (the loan book, arrears, originations and the acquisition funnel). - Model for trust: the right grain, keys and structure so marts are business-ready and reconcile across all reporting levels — with testing and version control as the default, not an afterthought. - Establish and own metric definitions and a data dictionary - so numbers mean the same thing in credit, finance and the board pack. - Build the core dashboards and reporting the business runs on - high-signal views people actually use - and own board, warehouse-facility and regulator-facing reporting so the numbers we report externally are trustworthy and defensible. - Build toward a single source of truth and governed self-service, so the data function scales without becoming a bottleneck as request volume grows. - Partner with Growth, Credit, Ops, Finance and Treasury - clarifying vague questions and ending with a concrete recommendation, not just a chart, and pushing back when a request is wrong. - Use AI and technology to move fast on the mechanical work while owning the judgement and verification that keeps the numbers honest. **What you will bring** We’re looking for senior capability, expressed as autonomy and breadth more than years — but as a guide, this typically looks like **5+ years** across analytics engineering, data analysis or BI, with the seniority to own outcomes end-to-end and set standards from scratch. - **You have owned a production data stack** - the pipelines feeding the warehouse and a tested, documented, version-controlled model layer on top - not just “used dbt” once. - **Strong, demonstrable business-facing analysis** - you have good instincts about which insights matter, can manage stakeholders and metric definitions, and reliably turn numbers into decisions. - **You think in definitions and trust** - your instinct on seeing inconsistent numbers is to model and define them once, not to patch another query. - **You use AI deliberately and verify it** - you wield agents to move fast on the mechanical work and own the verification that keeps outputs honest. - **You communicate trade-offs clearly**, make pragmatic calls about what is fit-for-stage versus over-engineered, and are happy being the founding owner who sets the standard others build on. **Our stack today (a starting point - you’ll shape where it goes):** Fivetran for ingestion, Snowflake as the warehouse, and Hex for reporting. **On requirements:** we care far more about skills, approach and the ability to learn than about specific certifications or a particular industry background. If you have strong modelling discipline and genuine business instinct, we want to hear from you - even if your résumé doesn’t tick every box above. But we won’t relax on git and testing fundamentals. **Why Join us** - **Build the data function, don't maintain one.** This is the first dedicated data hire - you're not inheriting a tangle of broken pipelines and conflicting metrics, you're defining how Skip models, defines and trusts its numbers from scratch. Real founding ownership, not a delegated slice. - **Own the numbers the whole company runs on.** From ingestion through to the board pack, warehouse-funder and regulator reporting - you sit at the centre of credit, growth, finance and exec, turning vague questions into decisions. Few roles give one person this much leverage over how a business actually thinks. - **A path to build and lead a team.** We're hiring one excellent founding owner today - but as request volume and the business scale, the opportunity to grow this into a data team you lead, or to deepen as the principal who sets the standard, will be explicitly on the table. - **Competitive comp and ESOP.** We pay competitively and back it with equity that reflects the founding nature of this role. As Skip scales many times over, you share in the upside you help build. - **Work at the frontier of data and AI.** Full support from an internal product and engineering team, a modern stack you'll shape (Fivetran, Snowflake, Hex), and a mandate to wield AI on the mechanical work while you own the judgement that keeps numbers honest. This is analytics engineering for the modern era, not hand-built spreadsheets and reconciliation weeks. - **Serious company, serious scale, real impact.** Backed by leading US venture funds and global credit partners Skip is in a true hyper-growth phase - loan book scaling rapidly, major distribution partnerships live. Your work helps hard-working Australians Skip to home ownership sooner, on a team that moves fast and backs each other to do the best work of our careers.