Director, Data

Hybrid, LA area, Bay Area, NYC metro, and South Florida THE ORGANIZATION Accion Opportunity Fund (AOF) is a leading Community Development Financial Institution dedicated to providing underserved small business owners with access to capital, networks, and coaching. For over 30 years, AOF has helped small business owners create jobs, build wealth, and strengthen communities by providing responsible financing and business support services. Since our founding, we have deployed more than $1 billion in financing and have served more than 4 million entrepreneurs through educational resources and business support programs. The majority of our clients come from historically underserved communities where access to traditional financing remains limited. As AOF continues its mission of expanding financial inclusion, we are building a scalable, sustainable financial institution that combines mission impact with strong financial performance. Our strategic vision includes expanding our lending capabilities, strengthening enterprise risk management, and preparing for future growth across additional financial products, including Credit Union services. We are looking for a Director of Data and Product Engineering to build and run the systems behind our data and analytics, our AI deployment, and the products our small business owners rely on. This is a hands-on, highly technical role. You will join as an individual contributor on a small engineering team, writing code, designing pipelines, and shipping systems yourself. You have managed engineers before, and we expect you to grow into leading a team here as our roadmap expands, but your first year is about building rather than staffing. We have never had a dedicated data engineering leader, and that is the gap we most need you to fill. You will own the data platform: the infrastructure, ingestion, orchestration, and tooling that our analytics and reporting depend on, along with the internal and eventually external data and AI products we build on top of it. You will spend the balance of your time on product engineering, for both customer-facing and internal products, across AOFCD and AOFCU. The blend of technical execution, business understanding, and communication is what makes this role work. In a single day you might go from coding with Claude Code (including writing the evals that tell you whether the output is any good) to reviewing AWS infrastructure changes to presenting a build-versus-buy recommendation to the executive team. You will report to the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer (CTSO). AOF has multiple data-focused teams across the organization, and they depend on you. Credit owns the credit models, policies, and related analytics spanning from up-front credit decisioning to analysis and management of the credit portfolio. Finance and Accounting synthesize all levels of reporting using a combination of data sources and techniques. They have been at the forefront of adopting AI and have been actively working with the engineering team to help us improve the internal data and AI tools we have developed; they will be key customers as you connect more finance-related systems into the data platform. Analytics Engineering and BI owns the dbt transformations, the core data models, Tableau reports, and ad hoc analytics used historically by much of AOF. Marketing is using data to transform the way potential customers find out about AOF. Operations relies on data and tools developed internally to guide their day-to-day activities servicing the portfolio and caring for AOF’s customers. Your team owns the platform all of that runs on, and owns the data and AI products we build on top of it. Therefore, a meaningful part of this job is partnership with teams you do not control through an org chart. Your platform will be judged on whether their work gets faster, more reliable, and less surprising. We are looking for someone who finds that arrangement energizing rather than frustrating. WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON Data platform and infrastructure Own the infrastructure AOF teams build on: our lake and warehouse, orchestration, dbt execution environments and CI, and the developer experience around all of it. Build and operate the ingestion layer that lands data reliably from source systems, including our Salesforce orgs and Salesforce Data Cloud, our lending systems, the credit union core, and third-party partners. Treat reliability, performance, cost, lineage, and observability as deliverables in their own right rather than cleanup work. Design for governance and privacy from the start: access control, PII handling under GLBA, and auditability across two legal entities with different regulators. Build the platform capabilities that regulatory and funder reporting depends on, including CDFI Fund reporting, CFPB Section 1071 small business lending data collection, and NCUA requirements as AOFCU comes online, working alongside the teams that author those models and re