Senior Product Engineer (Rust)

I'm working with a well-funded, ~45-person fintech client building the infrastructure layer for private credit, an asset class that today runs almost entirely on spreadsheets, PDFs, and tribal knowledge. Every deal, every filing, every covenant lives in a different format, in a different system. My client is building the platform that turns that chaos into something the whole business can query, trust, and build decisions on top of.
They're hiring a Core Platform Lead to join the data platform team and report directly to the CTO. You'll sit hand in hand with their lead engineer as a true peer, not someone picking up tickets. The team's lean right now, and this hire fills the biggest gap they've got: nobody's built out data ingestion from scratch before.
What you'll be doing

• Own the data ingestion and processing layer the rest of the business runs on, raw and messy through to clean and queryable
• Make the real build-vs-buy calls: knowing when an off-the-shelf tool solves the problem and when it doesn't
• Work at the core of systems where correctness and speed matter because of what's riding on the data
• Handle the governance side too: data quality, lineage, access control, sensitive data handling
• Help shape the platform's evolution as the company scales, not just keep the lights on
• Have a real voice in engineering culture and process as the team grows

What they're looking for

• Deep Rust experience, tradeoffs and fundamentals, not just syntax
• Strong distributed systems and large-scale backend background
• Ideally built ingestion pipelines or data infra from scratch before, or you're hungry to
• Flexible on years, firm on ability. 3-4+ years with a steep trajectory is the sweet spot, more if the reasoning's there
• Communicates clearly and concisely, can go deep without turning it into a lecture
• Genuinely curious about the product, you don't need finance background walking in
• A balanced take on AI in engineering, not a skeptic, not a zealot

Comp & Location
$200k-$250k. NYC hybrid if you're local (the CTO likes the team in person now and then), fully remote if you're not.