Lead Data Engineer

About the Team

The Data Platform Tech Team at Navi is instrumental in enabling data-driven decision-making across the organization. We build and manage the core infrastructure and tools required to collect, store, process, and analyze data at scale.

We operate one of the most robust data platforms in Indian fintech — managing over 10 petabytes of data across 25,000+ tables. Our systems ensure every data point is refreshed in under 5 minutes for batch and available within milliseconds for streaming use cases to surface insights. We enable teams across Lending, Insurance, Investments, and Payments to self-serve analytics and machine learning workflows with high confidence in data quality, timeliness, and availability.

About the Role

As an SDE-4 /Lead in the Data Platform team, you'll play a critical role in building large-scale backend services and distributed data systems that power Navi's business operations and intelligence. You'll work on high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure that processes billions of events and transactions with high reliability. You'll collaborate closely with senior engineers to deliver well-architected components and services that are observable, resilient, and scale efficiently under real-world workloads.

What We Expect From You

• Architect and drive large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, and backend services that are highly available, cost-efficient, secure, and extensible
• Establish platform vision and evolve foundational frameworks with multi-tenant, self-serve, and platform-first thinking
• Design for scale and resilience – enforce principles of clean architecture, observability, fault-tolerance, extensibility, and performance
• Lead end-to-end initiatives from problem definition to production rollout, balancing business impact with long-term technical sustainability
• Mentor and grow engineers (including Senior Engineers), setting technical direction, raising the quality bar, and fostering a strong engineering culture
• Make deep technical trade-offs explicit – connect system internals, architectural decisions, and platform costs with clarity
• Champion best practices in code quality, instrumentation, design patterns, and cloud-native development
• Influence cross-team architecture by partnering with product, infra, and data science to align long-term technical strategy with company goals
• Drive innovation by identifying gaps, proposing bold solutions, and creating reusable building blocks that accelerate multiple teams
• Demonstrate thought leadership by anticipating scale challenges, ensuring security/compliance, and contributing to future-readiness of the platform
• Typically requires 8+ years of strong software engineering experience, including proven architectural leadership in large-scale systems

Must Haves

• Deep expertise in modern data lakehouse and distributed data architectures, with hands-on proficiency in Spark, Flink, Kafka, Trino, Presto, Iceberg/Delta Lake, and large-scale storage/compute separation
• Proven track record of building and scaling multi-tenant data platforms, with awareness of cost efficiency, security, compliance, and operational excellence
• Architectural intuition at scale – capable of evaluating trade-offs between performance, latency, fault-tolerance, extensibility, and cost, and making decisions that stand the test of time
• Strong system internals knowledge (compilers, query engines, storage formats, distributed consensus, networking, JVM internals, or equivalent) and ability to explain them with clarity
• Hands-on leadership – ability to mentor senior engineers, drive adoption of engineering best practices, and raise the bar for architectural and operational excellence

Inside Navi

We are shaping the future of financial services for a billion Indians through products that are simple, accessible, and affordable. From Personal & Home Loans to UPI, Insurance, Mutual Funds, and Gold — we're building tech-first solutions that work at scale, with a strong customer-first approach.

Founded by Sachin Bansal & Ankit Agarwal in 2018, we are one of India's fastest-growing financial services organisations. But we're just getting started!

Our Culture

The Navi DNA

Ambition. Perseverance. Self-awareness. Ownership. Integrity.

We're looking for people who dream big when it comes to innovation. At Navi, you'll be empowered with the right mechanisms to work in a dynamic team that builds and improves innovative solutions. If you're driven to deliver real value to customers, no matter the challenge, this is the place for you.

We chase excellence by uplifting each other—and that starts with every one of us.

Why You'll Thrive at Navi

At Navi, it's about how you think, build, and grow. You'll thrive here if:

• You're impact-driven : You take ownership, build boldly, and care about making a real difference
• You strive for excellence : Good isn't good enough. You bring focus, precision, and a passion for quality

You embrace change : You adapt quickly, move fast, and always put the customer first.