Data & Intelligence Platform Lead

About the role

Summer is a Certified B Corp® on a mission to restore financial freedom for the 46 million Americans burdened by student debt. We combine deep policy expertise with powerful technology to simplify every step of college cost planning and loan repayment. We have helped people save an average of $278 per month and more than $1.8 billion in total savings to date. By partnering with leading employers, cities, and financial institutions, including ADP, the City of New York, Banc of California, Norton Healthcare, and the American Federation of Teachers, Summer helps millions of Americans move closer to a debt-free future. Backed by $30 million in funding from top investors including Rebalance Capital, SemperVirens, QED Investors, General Catalyst, and Flourish Ventures, we're building the infrastructure that powers student loan relief and education affordability in America. Your Role We are seeking a Data & Intelligence Platform Lead to join our Engineering team. In this role, you will be the foundational architect of Summer's Data & Intelligence Platform. You will lead evolution from an application-first data culture-currently reliant on tribal knowledge and an ad hoc data lake-to an enterprise-grade platform capable of powering strategic business insights and AI-driven debt optimization at massive scale. You will architect the "Identity" strategy that stitches together disparate federal and private data sources into a definitive user profile, ensuring Summer is Data Centric, AI-Native, and strategically prepared to navigate the complex business landscape intrinsic to the student loan ecosystem. You will also support the business as a whole, including preparing data artifacts, processes, and governance methodologies to enable Sales, Marketing, Operations, and the entire Summer team.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Data Leadership
• Full enterprise data management: Define and execute the strategy for end-to-end data lifecycle management, including ingestion, storage, processing, quality, and accessibility, establishing data as a first-class, reliable asset across all business functions.
• Borrower Identity Architecture: Lead the "stitching" of disparate data sources (federal servicers, payroll, and private lenders) to create a high-fidelity, 360-degree view of a user's debt history.
• Mature the Data Lake: Mature our current Snowflake infrastructure into a governed, high-performance BI layer. You will eliminate "tribal knowledge" by codifying naming conventions and logic into clean, reusable models.
• AI & Intelligence Infrastructure
• AI-Native Core: Build and maintain the "Feature Store" and semantic layer required for possible AI features including agentic policy decoding, workflow review anomaly detection, and more.
• Contextual Reasoning: Implement the data structures (Vector stores, Graph-based logic) that allow AI agents to navigate complex regulatory relationships on behalf of our rapidly growing user base.
• Feedback Loops: Orchestrate data pipelines to ensure model predictions and behavioral signals flow back into the product UI, creating a virtuous cycle of user value.
• Analytics Enablement & Collaboration
• Self-Service Sovereignty: Partner with our Analytics team to minimize ad-hoc data requests. You will build the frameworks that allow analysts to self-serve without reinventing logic.
• Observability by Default: Partner with our application teams to ensure that every new feature is instrumented for deep product analytics, system health, and data mining from day one.
• Cross-Functional Synergy: Bridge the gap between engineering and product / analytics, ensuring our technical architecture seamlessly supports the product and business needs before we have them.
• Governance, Security, & Ethics
• Security: Ensure the absolute protection of user PII and financial data and partner information, upholding the core mandate of security.
• Compliance: Implement and maintain industry-leading frameworks (e.g., SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP) to meet the highest security standards for partner and government due diligence.
• Data Stewardship & Ownership: Implement automated data discovery, classification, and lineage tools to codify data ownership, establish clear metadata processes, and ensure data is well-understood and governed across the entire organization.
• You Might Be a Fit If You Have
• The Foundation: 8+ years of experience in Data Engineering or Platform Architecture, ideally within high-growth Fintech or highly regulated environments.
• Architectural Vision: Proven track record of moving an organization from ad-hoc reporting to a structured "Data Platform" mindset.
• AI/ML Fluency: Deep experience with the data-side of

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