About Ellis
Ellis is building the unified data layer for private credit fund managers. We ingest, reconcile, and make sense of the financial data that fund CFOs and controllers live inside every day — NAV calculations, LP returns, reconciliation across GP records and fund administrators, SBIC compliance filings — and turn it into a trusted, queryable foundation for every decision the fund makes.
We're a seed-stage company with real customers, real data, and real financial stakes. Design partners and early clients depend on the accuracy of our platform for their fund reporting today. A silent data error costs us a customer permanently. That trust is the moat, and it's what makes this role matter.
About the role
Our data infrastructure is where correctness is non-negotiable and where every engineer can explain, line by line, why a fund's NAV is what it is.
You'll work directly with our lead data engineer to harden and expand this layer as we onboard new partners and push toward SOC 2 Type II certification in 2026. AI belongs here — as an accelerator, not an author. You'll use Claude as a pair programmer to ship faster. But you will not be letting agents make autonomous decisions about how a fund's interest accrual gets calculated.
You work in close partnership with the AI-native product engineering team, but you own the data contract boundary. Their agents consume what you define; they don't reach around it.
This is the right role for an engineer who gets energy from owning a codebase deeply — from being the person who can trace a reconciliation discrepancy back to its source and defend the calculation logic to a fund's CFO.
Data infrastructure and ETL
- Mutation audit log — Design and ship the full mutation log our SOC 2 Type II audit requires. You'll build who changed what, when, and from where, live before the audit window closes in September 2026.
- Partner ETL throughput — Harden the ingestion pipeline for new fund manager onboarding. Each partner arrives with different CSV column names, fund structures, and edge cases. You'll reduce per-partner onboarding time and help automate column mapping to compress our 12-week timeline toward 30 days.
- Data contract enforcement — Our data infrastructure exposes a typed, versioned contract to the product feature layer. You'll help define, test, and maintain that boundary so the product team can move fast without touching financial calculation logic.
Correctness and validation
- Integration tests against real data — Extend test coverage using partner-like data fixtures, deterministic reconciliation checks, and regression suites that make silent errors impossible to ship.
- Cascade calculation safety — Our underlying data logic initiates calculations for asset value, investor gains, and profit and loss metrics whenever data is saved. You will own the guardrails that make these complex, linked updates and triggers safe to modify, and the tests that prove their reliability.
- Root-cause ownership — When a reconciliation discrepancy surfaces in production, you lead the debug cycle. You trace it to the row, explain the logic, and ship the fix.
Platform reliability and compliance
- SOC 2 readiness — Partner with the team on access controls, data lineage, and audit trail completeness. Compliance isn't a checkbox here — it's the evidence that our customers' data is handled at institutional grade.
- Onboarding automation — As we build self-service column mapping and S3-triggered ingestion, you own the engineering quality of those systems, making sure automation doesn't introduce the silent errors that manual processes currently catch.
- Performance under load — Own the performance characteristics of the ingestion pipeline as we onboard more partners and more historical data. Queries and calculations need to stay fast.
What success looks like in your first 6-12 months
- Mutation log shipped on time — The SOC 2 audit finds a complete, queryable record of every data change with full attribution, and it's live before the audit window closes.
- Onboarding time compresses — Per-partner ETL setup drops meaningfully. New partners spend less time waiting on Ellis and more time using the product.
- Zero silent correctness bugs — The integration test suite catches calculation regressions before they reach staging. No partner discovers a data error by finding it in their own models first.
- The data contract holds under pressure — Product engineers know exactly which contracts they can consume and which require your review. The boundary holds even when shipping pressure builds.
- You're the person people ask — When a hard schema decision comes up or a fund-level calculation edge case surfaces, you're the engineer the team goes to first.
The ideal candidate
- Have 6+ years of backend engineering with a meaningful stretch owning ETL pipelines, data infrastructure, or financial data systems.
- Deeply fluent in Python — we run FastAPI + SQLAlchemy + PostgreSQL 18, and you should feel at home in that stack.
- Have designed or maintained audit logging, data lineage, or compliance-grade record-keeping, ideally in a fintech or regulated context.
- Hold strong opinions about integration testing and you can articulate why synthetic fixtures aren't good enough for financial correctness.
- Get energy from owning a codebase, not just contributing tickets to one — you can explain every meaningful decision in the files you touch.
- Understand the difference between shipping fast and shipping correctly, and know when each is the right call.
Nice to have
- SOC 2 or equivalent compliance experience
- Experience with fund administration, private credit, or financial reconciliation workflows
- Familiarity with per-tenant data architecture and isolation patterns
Location
This role is based in New York and will work from our Soho office 3-4 days a week.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Flexible PTO
- Company-provided laptop
- Hybrid work environment with periodic team offsites
- Chance to shape engineering culture and infrastructure from the earliest days
Apply
Send us a note about the work you want to do and anything you have built that you are proud of. We read every application.