Senior Data Systems Engineer

About the role

Collections today works like an emergency room. The doctors carry too many patients, everyone arrives at their worst moment, and nobody has their chart. We're making it primary care. January personalizes interactions and optimizes decisions across every stage of consumer credit. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.

Most consumers want to pay what they owe. They want a way out, not a break. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. Those consumers rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more because we collect more and charge less.

Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to make someone's hardest financial moment more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow.

As our first Data Systems Engineer, you'll own the foundation under every decision we make: what data lands, what our reports say, and what we offer to consumers. When the data is right, someone in their hardest financial moment gets an offer that fits their life. When it's wrong, they get the wrong balance, the wrong call, or nothing at all.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring our first data systems engineer. Data is the most valuable thing January has: 20 million consumers, $20 billion in debt, and every record behind them. Every decision we make about a consumer starts with our data.

As we grow our business, it’s critical that our data system scales with it. The data that powers collections now has to power every stage of consumer credit. You'll decide what that foundation looks like and how it grows.

This is a blank page. What gets built, in what order, and how this function interacts with downstream consumers is yours to decide. You'll set the standard for how we treat our data: trusted by default, understood by everyone who touches it, and increasingly able to look after itself.

Engineers, analysts, ops, and product all depend on what you build. You'll set the standards that let them make good calls on data without you in the room.

You thrive on obsessing over data quality and infrastructure, and you move fast to improve both.

WHAT WE NEED

- You've built and owned a data pipeline end to end.

- You design for failure. Safe replayability, recovery that self heals where possible and has a clear runbook when it doesn’t

- You treat data quality as a key indicator of pipeline health

- You can own migrating a legacy system into a durable data pipeline by identifying the highest impact opportunities first, and you know when to build vs. buy.

- You've collaborated with multiple stakeholders/data consumers, with an ability to manage asks and hold boundaries where they need to be held