SQL / Data Engineer (North American Timezones) - remote

Aurora Payments
Posted 3 years ago
Location Disclaimer - **Note that while this role is fully remote, the employee must be available and working during a mainland US time zone (Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific). During month-end close and commission processing times, later evening hours (Pacific time) may be required to interface with our finance team.

With that said, if you love working nights and want to live 12 hours opposite our office, go for it! Only you know your strengths and tolerance for time zone adaptation here. We're human, and we accept that human things happen,  but a time zone difference can't be the reason why deliverables are missed or you aren't available for questions.

We do have three corporate office locations and would be thrilled to have you in any of them, if you are local to Tempe, AZ, Westlake Village, CA, or Mentor (Cleveland), OH. **

Now, with that out of the way, moving forward:

Who we are:
Aurora is a payment processor. We're the company that moves money from the coffee shop customer's credit card to the coffee shop owner's bank account. We provide our services directly to merchants (small businesses) as well as to our sales partners who themselves sell services to merchants. 

We support over 23,000 merchants on multiple sponsor banks and transaction processing platforms. We specialize in niche vertical markets, association partnerships, and also "Main Street America".

At the risk of sounding cliche, we function like a well-established startup. There is a great deal of functional overlap. Very seldom will someone tell you "that's not in my job description". We encourage cross-training and learning throughout all business areas.

What we need:
With over $10 Billion in transaction processing volume annually, we accumulate a lot of data. We also have a large number of sales partners who need to be paid, fairly and transparently, for the opportunities with which they entrust us. This means properly processing, analyzing, and presenting data.

We need a confident analyst who understands data and thrives on learning the business. You should love SQL, and be prepared to answer most questions with SQL, but we don't expect you to know every dialect out of the box. On a typical day, and there is no typical day, you might be asked to present a 36 month view of the risk/profitability ratio of accounts within a specific sales partner or vertical market. Right after that, you might field a question from a colleague in operations about a specific partner's payout. During partner payout processing time, there will likely be a lot of heads-down work with our custom-engineered systems and validating input/output to ensure that we pay our partners properly.

Specific skills that will help you to excel in this job:
  • A SQL oriented mind. If you think in queries, you're going to kill it.
  • Specific dialects that we work with:
    • PostgreSQL - all of our net-new development is Postgres or Postgres compatible (Cockroach, Spanner's Postgres interface, etc)
    • BigQuery standard SQL - We've built our data warehouse platform on BigQuery and interacting with it will be a huge part of your daySQL Server - We still have legacy data in Microsoft SQL Server. Ideally, part of this job will be properly modifying data structures so that it can be ELT into BigQuery, but in absence of that, you will need to query it.
    • mySQL/MariaDB - Less critical, but nice to have for two of our legacy platforms.
  • Understanding of how data pipelines work and when they're used. We're a Fivetran shop, but we use other connectors as well.
  • Understanding of columnar-store data warehouses and when they are appropriate to use.
  • Tableau and PowerBI - we use Tableau for visualizations and are in the process of rolling out PowerBI for our business-users to self-service query.  
  • Excel. It's not glamorous, but we'd expect that you are extremely proficient in advanced spreadsheet work.

Non-technical attributes:

Fluent to native-level English communication, in writing and verbal communication. You will be interacting with our business users and some of our external partners,  so English is part of the job. 

A strong ability to make data understandable for non-technical business users. Can you take the complex and make it seem simple? 

A mind for efficiency.  Are you a person who is always looking for more efficient ways to run the same process? 

Payment processing or FinTech experience - not a hard requirement, but this will accelerate your integration into the company.

Acceptance of the fact that sometimes, work and personal time blend together. We run a critical business and occasionally need to deal with issues outside of core-US hours. 

We’re an organization driven by a passion for helping our clients and partners succeed. You should also be passionate about what you do and take pride in the process as well as the output of your work.