[Hiring] VP of Data and AI @Fora Financial

Role Description

A Day in the Life of a VP of Data and AI involves:

• Defining and driving the long-term roadmap for our data ecosystem, covering ingestion, modeling, governance, observability, and BI.
• Owning and evolving our existing Debezium-based CDC infrastructure, ensuring reliability, scalability, and strong schema-change handling.
• Overseeing ingestion from SQL Server and cloud storage; extending ingestion to additional data sources and third-party systems.
• Building and leading a best-in-class team across Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and future Data Science/ML Engineering.
• Partnering with Risk to deliver reproducible training-ready datasets—feature sets, label pipelines, temporal models, monitoring tables.
• Architecting data foundations that support ML and AI workloads, including feature pipelines, embedding/vector layers, and model governance.
• Establishing and enforcing data governance: semantic consistency, naming conventions, data contracts, PII handling, lineage, and access controls.
• Driving performance and cost optimization across Snowflake, transformations, ingestion workflows, and BI workloads.
• Ensuring the BI layer is reliable, governed, and trustable, with well-modeled marts and consistent metrics.
• Setting technical standards, mentoring team members, and creating a culture of high-quality, testable, maintainable data work.

Qualifications

• 10+ years across data engineering, analytics engineering, ML infrastructure, or related fields; 3–5+ years in leadership.
• Proven experience scaling Snowflake and DBT in production.
• Strong background with SQL Server ingestion patterns, cloud-storage pipelines, and SaaS data integrations.

Requirements

• This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship. All applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the US.

Benefits

• Attractive company subsidized Medical, Dental and Vision plans with leading insurance providers.
• 401K Plan with Company Match.
• Life Insurance at No Cost to Employees.
• Generous Time Off Plan Including Rollover Vacation Days.
• Commuter Benefits.
• Health Care and Dependent Care Flexible Spending.
• Weekly breakfast, snacks and Friday lunches provided onsite.
• Remote working model.

Company Description

Fora Financial is a technology-enabled leading provider of flexible financing to small and medium sized businesses. Since our inception in 2008, we have supported more than 55,000 merchants nationwide with over $4 billion of capital used for a variety of purposes, from funding everyday operating expenses to managing cash flow gaps to facilitating business expansion, and much more.

Over the past seventeen years, Fora Financial has grown from two founders in a small Manhattan workspace to a company of nearly 200 employees. Fora Financial prides itself on being a partner-centric organization, offering a customized funding approach, collaborating with our small-business customers to understand their needs in a dynamic and ever-changing economic environment.

While we work very hard, we do not take ourselves too seriously. We enjoy a family-like camaraderie that fosters a passion for success in each Fora Financial Team member.