Kiavi is one of the nation’s largest private lenders to residential real estate investors (REIs). We harness the power of data & technology to offer our customers a simpler, more reliable, and faster way to access the capital they need to scale their businesses.
Formerly known as LendingHome, we’re committed to helping REIs revitalize the approximately $25 trillion worth of aged U.S. housing stock to provide move-in ready homes and rental housing for millions of Americans across the country.
Combining our technology and industry expertise, Kiavi has grown to a team of over 400 and has won many awards over the years including Forbes Fintech 50, Finovate Awards, Best Digital Mortgage Platform, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and many more.
- Loans Funded: $27 billion in loans funded
- Homes financed: 100,000+ projects funded for our customers across the country
- Geography: 45 states + D.C. where we lend to REIs so they can revitalize neighborhoods
- Employees: Over 450 employees with competitive benefits and perks
This position can be based remotely in any of our approved hiring regions. Our hybrid distributed workforce philosophy allows us to find the best talent in the country and build diverse teams, while allowing our colleagues to work from the location that works best for them.
The Opportunity
Kiavi holds a distinct advantage over our competitors, built on 10+ years of proprietary loan origination data and a purpose-built loan origination system. This combination enables us to originate loans faster and more efficiently, with fewer errors and superior credit performance.
We are now aggressively doubling down on this strategy, to achieve this, we are seeking a seasoned Director of Engineering to lead Data Infrastructure, MLOps, and data support efforts for teams relying on data.
As the leader of our world-class team of Data Engineers and MLOps engineers, you will be at the center of this transformation. You are responsible for building the platform for powering Kiavi's AI strategy and will directly contribute to the acceleration of using Data/AI/ML towards changing the way we do lending.
Your primary mission is to build the Data and AI/ML Foundation to enable all of Kiavi's Data and AI/ML initiatives through a highly available, modern Data Stack. The ideal candidate will have real-world experience in building Data and AI/ML Platforms with proven expertise in managing both Data Engineering and MLOps architecture. This includes hands-on experience in Data Pipelines, Data Analytics, traditional ML and modern Gen AI capabilities.
You will play a pivotal role in building upon Kiavi’s past achievements, leveling up the team with your best practices, and delivering the next wave of AI-driven success for Kiavi.
Location
- Required location in Pittsburgh or San Francisco / Hybrid (Max 1 day a week in office expectation)
What You'll Do (The Role)
- Lead & Mentor a high-performing, skilled, Data Engineering and MLOps team including engineers, senior technical program manager and other technical staff. You'll be responsible for hiring, coaching, and mentoring, with a strong emphasis on developing the careers of your engineers.
- Foster Team and Career Development: Formalize and champion career growth across the Data Infrastructure and MLOps teams. Ensure every team member has a clear career path and an active development plan.
- Drive Technical Strategy & Vision: You will lead the collaborative development of the technical vision and roadmap for our Data and AI/ML platform. You'll partner closely with senior leaders across Risk, Data Analytics, Data Science, and Product Management to co-define the strategy, ensuring it is context-aware of Kiavi's size, capacity, and product needs to drive organization-wide adoption. You will also serve as an "operational steward" for the data stack, prioritizing core infrastructure and maintainability. Your ultimate goal is to build a scaled, efficient, and well-governed platform founded on reproducibility, explainability, bias elimination, and sustainability for all AI/ML initiatives.
- Platform Architecture & Scalability: Work closely with architecture specialists on the team to ensure Kiavi has a scalable core data platform that meets business needs. Identify and prioritize hidden tech debt in the stack that lowers engineer and stakeholder productivity. See that data is efficiently captured, processed, stored, and made accessible across the organization. Drive evolution of the multi-warehouse ecosystem (Snowflake and Databricks) to provide a reliable, high-performance foundation for analytics, machine learning, and business decision-making.
- Foster Customer-Centricity: Support customer-facing initiatives and internal data-dependent teams with a customer orientation. Communicate the “Why” and make certain the platform and infrastructure are built and managed to directly meet customer and internal stakeholder requirements for speed, reliability, and data quality.
- Execute with Excellence: Lead your team in delivering complex, large scale projects where availability, accuracy and security are critical. This includes hands-on technical design, code reviews, and scalable architecture guidance. You will also oversee the data infrastructure layer that powers analytics and AI, ensuring seamless data movement, orchestration, and integration with core engineering systems.
- Align Business and Infrastructure Needs: Drive adoption of tooling and governance by being the champion for ensuring business stakeholder input is integrated into all major infrastructure choices.
- Accountability and Ownership: Define and ensure clear ownership and prioritization processes across Data Infrastructure and MLOps to eliminate ambiguity and ensure timely resolution of cross-functional requests. You will institute effective capacity planning that correctly reflects prioritized business needs and guarantees a reliable mechanism for completing small, high-value tasks alongside larger strategic initiatives. You will partner closely with Engineering and DevOps to ensure end-to-end reliability and operational alignment among data pipelines, applications, and platform services
- Own the Full Lifecycle: You will lead the end-to-end execution of your team's roadmap, from initial planning and milestone definition with Technical Program Management / Product Management, to co-developing OKRs, managing timelines, communicating risk, and collaborating with key stakeholders throughout.
- Value Realization & Cost Optimization: Ensure Kiavi has a structured process and data for real-time cost measurement. Articulate the quantified value proposition of infrastructure investments to leadership and business partners. Prioritize investments based on clear ROI and business impact, while strategically reducing spend on low-value initiatives.
- Operational Monitoring and Governance: Lead the team to build and implement robust monitoring beyond basic uptime, specifically focusing on model drift/decay and performance feedback loops to assess the ongoing health and risk level of production models.
- Optimize for Speed through Stability: Champion an approach where compliance, risk management, and infosec are built into all processes, embedding scalable solutions and guardrails that protect regulatory integrity and security without slowing delivery. Ensure that foundational platform work that minimizes technical debt drives the roadmap, enabling the team to maintain high velocity and rapidly adapt to new business needs.
- Champion Quality: Set and maintain a high bar for engineering and operational quality, with a sharp focus on the compliance and correctness required in our lending systems. You'll leverage customer and system data to iterate and improve our products rapidly.
- Resource Allocation & SDLC: Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure their needs are captured during planning cycles and provide dedicated or rotational support for teams relying on data infrastructure. Work with Technical Program Manager to drive predictable delivery timelines. Operate with standardized SDLC practices so that models, data and systems are auditable and reproducible by default (rather than by request).
What We're Looking For (Qualifications)
- Proven Data and AI/ML Leadership: You have successfully led a team in building and shipping production Data and MLOps/LLMOps Infrastructure to achieve concrete business goals.
- Scaled Platform Experience: You have experience leading platform teams at a medium-to-large company, demonstrating the ability to transition from scrappy builds to a scaled, mature platform that supports diverse AI/ML use cases across multiple business functions (e.g., Risk, Data Science, Revenue teams).
- Technical Depth: You are a former data or ML engineer and not afraid to "dive deep." You can comfortably lead technical design discussions, review code, and challenge your team on technical trade-offs. You are an active, hands-on technical leader who maintains deep fluency in the platform's architecture and implementation details. You have used industry-leading Data and AI/ML systems such as Databricks, Snowflake, AWS SageMaker, Kubeflow, etc. You are proficient in understanding data pipelines, addressing latency, and communicating best practices for tools such as Airflow, Dagster, etc. You have experience in building highly available systems using Kubernetes, Kafka, etc.
- You are familiar with modern LLM evaluation, telemetry and observability platforms (e.g., Langfuse, MLflow, LangGraph, or equivalents), and understand how to leverage these tools to manage model performance, cost, and safety in production.
- You have some experience integrating and managing data systems with specialized frameworks such as MCP (Model Context Protocol), or other proprietary/niche model evaluation and telemetry tools.
- You are open to understanding the system’s 'guts' as a 'player-coach' and may occasionally write a query, script, or build a prototype to demonstrate technical direction or unblock a critical path
- People Leadership: You are an exceptional people manager who knows how to attract, develop, and retain top talent. You see mentorship and curiosity as important parts of your leadership role, and you regularly seek feedback from your reports and your peers to build trust and become a better leader. You are adept at setting Director-level strategy while maintaining a high degree of accountability for execution, ensuring important tasks and critical decisions within your purview are handled effectively without excessive delegation.
- Collaborative Decision-Making: Demonstrated ability to solicit, synthesize, and incorporate diverse technical and business viewpoints into strategic decisions, fostering a "Disagree and Commit" culture and driving disciplined decision-making through clear role definition and streamlined cross-functional processes.
- Execution: You have a track record of delivering complex, large-scale projects in a dynamic, fast-paced business environment.
- Clear Communication: You can clearly articulate a vision, create alignment, and communicate technical and business risks to stakeholders at all levels. You communicate well within your cross functional team, with stakeholders, and across cross-functional teams that depend on your team’s output.
- Experience: You have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 5+ years in a direct people management role.
- B.S. degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience).
- No real-estate or mortgage experience is needed, but a hunger to learn our business is!
Kiavi takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. Work locations are categorized into one of three tiers based on cost of labor for that geographic area. These ranges may be modified in the future.
Region 1 - $207,300 - $310,900 + 20% bonus + equity + benefits
Region 2 - $197,000 - $295,400 + 20% bonus + equity + benefits
Region 3 - $163,500 - $280,000 + 20% bonus + equity + benefits
To find a location’s tier, please refer to https://kiavi.com/compensation. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries. Within the range, the successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. Your recruiter can share more about the specific base pay range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the pay range listed above reflects the base salary only, and does not include the target value benefits.
Benefits and Perks
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance: Kiavi offers free employee-only coverage for medical, dental, and vision plans. Dependents receive a heavily discounted premium, competitively placed in the 90th percentile for cost.
- Health Savings Account (HSA): For those enrolled in a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), Kiavi provides an annual employer contribution to HSAs: $1,000 for individual coverage and $2,000 for dependents.
- Disability and Life Insurance: Immediate access to short-term and long-term disability insurance, as well as group life and AD&D insurance, with coverage at 1x annual salary.
- Remote Work Policy: Kiavi supports working remotely for day to day activities for most roles and occasionally may ask employees to gather in person for key meetings, training, team building etc. For remote workers, Kiavi offers a one-time office setup reimbursement of up to $500 and a monthly $85 stipend for internet and phone expenses. For in-office workers, Kiavi offers employer contributions to commuter benefits account, either for parking or public transportation.
- Flexible Time Off: Employees are empowered to manage their own time off, with no strict limits, as long as it's approved by their manager.
- Paid Leaves: Up to 8 weeks of paid leave for medical or caregiver purposes, and 12 weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave. Short-term disability leave is also available for birthing mothers.
- 401(k) & Company Match: A 401(k) plan managed by Fidelity, with Kiavi matching 100% of contributions up to 3% of compensation or $8,000 (whichever is less). All employer contributions are immediately vested.
Protect yourself from recruitment scams:
- If you are offered an interview or a role with Kiavi, this will be communicated with you through email, via an official email address ending in @kiavi.com or @lendinghome.com.
- You will never be asked for payments of any kind during the process.
- We also never communicate with candidates via Whatsapp at any point during the recruitment process.
- We won’t ask for personal information or data via text message. If you have any concerns regarding how genuine a text message is, please contact your recruiter.
- You can find our official Kiavi careers page here. We advise you to check that the page details and website addresses match if you have any concerns.