Founding Data Products Engineer

About Vinyl Equity

We’re building the next generation of capital-markets infrastructure, starting with a modern, digital-native transfer agent designed for today’s public companies.

Vinyl Equity is transforming one of the most legacy-heavy and operationally critical parts of the capital markets by delivering the first API-driven, real-time infrastructure for public companies. Our platform replaces slow, manual processes with secure, automated workflows that help issuers operate faster, more efficiently, and with greater confidence.

We’re backed by leading investors including Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Infinity Ventures, and others who have funded many of the world’s most impactful financial-technology companies. Our team draws from deep experience at NYSE, Equiniti, Computershare, and AngelList, giving us a unique understanding of the industry’s pain points — and how to solve them.

Our engineering organization is headquartered in Mangaluru. This role works alongside our core engineering team in person, with the day-to-day pace and collaboration that proximity makes possible.

About the Role

Vinyl runs on data. Every transfer, every dividend, every proxy vote, every corporate action produces a record — and the value we deliver to issuers depends on how quickly, transparently, and intelligently that data flows back to them. We’ve built a real-time reporting platform, a Shareholder Intelligence product line that is already live in market with early customers, an immutable ledger that anchors trust across every product surface, and the data governance foundations that turn Vinyl’s compliance certifications into customer-evident outcomes. We’re looking for a founding engineer to take all of this and shape it into the data product line that becomes one of the primary reasons issuers choose Vinyl.

As Founding Data Products Engineer, you own the Data Products function end-to-end across four connected surfaces: Reporting & Analytics (the real-time analytics experience every Vinyl customer relies on), the Immutable Ledger (Vinyl’s system-of-record trust layer), Shareholder Intelligence (our growing product line that turns Vinyl’s position as system of record into actionable insight for issuers about who actually owns their stock and how that ownership moves), and Data Governance for Compliance (data lineage, retention, PII classification, and regulatory reporting that translate Vinyl’s SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA postures into customer-facing evidence). You inherit a small data engineering team on day one and lead it by building alongside them — architecting, shipping, debugging, and shaping the function as it grows.

This is a builder role, not a specifier role. You will sit with customers to gather requirements, architect the solution, write production code where it has the highest leverage, lead the team by modeling the work, and represent Data Products to the executive team, the board, and prospects. No part of the stack is beneath you and no part of the customer conversation is too tactical to lean into. The people who succeed in this role are the ones who would have started a company themselves — and chose instead to come build a function inside one that is already finding product-market fit.

Real-time matters here. Most transfer agents run reporting on batch cycles — daily, weekly, sometimes monthly. We sync transactions to reports in real time. That technical foundation is in place; the product opportunity is in turning it into a customer-facing differentiator that issuers feel every day. You will work hands-on with the data engineering team on the reporting warehouse, partner with the compliance and security teams on the governance surface, and partner with the CTO on the commercial strategy for Data Products as a growing revenue line.

Modern access matters here too. The next generation of data products is not just dashboards — it’s customers connecting their own tools to Vinyl through APIs, their AI agents querying Vinyl over MCP, and their users asking natural-language questions of their data and getting accurate, grounded answers. Vinyl’s real-time data foundation makes all of that possible. Your job is to ship it as product.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the Data Products function end-to-end — strategy, roadmap, architecture, and shipping — across Reporting & Analytics, the Immutable Ledger, Shareholder Intelligence, and Data Governance for Compliance.
• Lead the data engineering team by example: architect the highest-leverage surfaces yourself, write production code where your hands matter most, and model the technical bar the function operates against.
• Sit with customers — prospects, design partners, paying issuers — to gather requirements directly. Translate what you hear into roadmap, architecture decisions, and the next thing your team builds.
• Scale Shareholder Intelligence from v1 (live in market) into a defensible, commercially significant product line. Own v2 architecture and synthesize early customer feedback into the roadmap. Define the metrics that signal product-market fit and renewal.
• Turn real-time reporting into a customer-facing differentiator. Architect and ship the product surfaces, dashboards, alerts, and API patterns that make Vinyl’s data infrastructure tangible for issuers every day.
• Ship modern, agent-ready access to Vinyl data — customer-facing APIs that let issuers connect their own tools (BI platforms, ETL, internal apps); MCP server access that lets customers’ AI agents read and reason over Vinyl data; and natural-language query experiences that let issuer users ask their data questions and get accurate, grounded answers.
• Own the Immutable Ledger as a trust anchor across product surfaces — architect and ship the surfaces where its guarantees show up in customer experience, compliance, audit, and the broader Vinyl narrative.
• Build the Data Governance for Compliance surface — data lineage, retention, PII classification and access controls, and regulatory reporting. Translate Vinyl’s SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA postures (and upcoming SOC 1 and ISO 42001 work) into customer-evident product surfaces and audit artifacts. Partner closely with the compliance and security teams; turn their domain expertise into shipped product.
• Own Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning for the data platform — RPO and RTO targets, backup architecture, failover patterns, tabletop exercises, and the regulator-facing evidence that demonstrates Vinyl can keep operating through worst-case scenarios. Vinyl is a system of record for our customers; loss or unavailability of data is the business risk that matters most.
• Partner closely with the Product Manager, Issuer Activation — their work on issuer onboarding and the Data Ingestion Application is the upstream of much of what your Reporting and Governance surfaces work with.
• Represent Data Products in customer conversations alongside the sales team, in board narrative, and in long-term architecture decisions across the company — acting as the senior technical and product voice on how Vinyl’s data infrastructure changes what issuers can know about their own equity.
• Define and track success metrics: Shareholder Intelligence customer adoption and renewal, analytics product engagement, report query latency, data freshness, governance and audit outcomes, and the unit economics that signal Data Products as a real revenue line.
• Write clear architecture documents, decision memos, customer-facing playbooks, and board updates. Translate data architecture, analytical complexity, and compliance requirements into narratives that engineers, executives, and customers can act on.

This is an in-office role at our Mangaluru engineering location.

Role Requirements

• 8+ years building production software in data-intensive environments — with substantial time in roles where you owned outcomes end-to-end (founder, founding engineer, principal engineer, solutions architect, tech lead). What matters is not the title, but having lived through customer discovery → architecture → shipping → operating, and done all of it with your hands.
• Hands-on shipping production code today — not having stepped away from the editor years ago. You should be comfortable writing the highest-leverage code yourself, debugging in production, and reviewing your team’s pull requests with depth.
• Direct experience architecting systems on a relational data warehouse — understanding query performance, schema design tradeoffs, data freshness, and the operational realities of real-time data sync at scale.
• Track record of taking an early-stage data product (v0 or v1) and scaling it into a commercially significant product line with paying customers and clear renewal signals.
• Strong customer fluency — you can sit in a sales meeting, listen to an issuer’s actual problem, and walk out with the right architectural insight. You’ve done this before and know how to hold both the technical and the commercial conversations at the same time.
• Strong working knowledge of analytics workflows — dashboards, reports, exports, embedded analytics, alerting — and how to make complex data legible to non-technical end users.
• Working knowledge of data governance practices — lineage, retention, PII classification, access controls — and how they show up as product surfaces, not just internal policies.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity strategies for data systems — RPO/RTO targets, backup and restore architecture, regional failover, tabletop exercises, and the auditor-facing evidence that demonstrates resilience under regulator scrutiny.
• Experience leading by example — small teams that punch above their weight because you set the technical bar, share work generously, and create space for others to grow. Comfort coaching engineers more junior than you and partnering with engineers and architects more senior.
• Strong written communication: architecture documents, customer-facing playbooks, audit and compliance artifacts, investor and board updates. You write tight, opinionated, decision-driving prose.
• Comfort communicating vertically and horizontally: with the CEO and CTO on strategy, with sales on customer conversations, with engineering on architecture, with the board on outcomes. You can hold all of these conversations credibly.
• Experience working with distributed teams across geographies.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML tools in a product or operational setting.

Nice to Haves

• Founder or founding-engineer experience — you’ve been part of building a company or function from very early stage and know what that feels like in your bones.
• Exposure to capital markets, transfer agency, broker-dealer operations, or securities settlement.
• Experience launching a shareholder intelligence, beneficial ownership, market surveillance, or comparable financial-intelligence product.
• Background in embedded analytics or BI platforms.
• Prior work on real-time data infrastructure — CDC, streaming, sub-second reporting, or event-driven analytics architectures.
• Experience with immutable-ledger, audit-grade, or compliance-anchored data systems.
• Experience shipping customer-facing API products, MCP server integrations, or natural-language data-query experiences — having lived through the product decisions around access control, query grounding, and accuracy.
• Product experience in a regulated environment with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or similar compliance regimes — having shipped audit-ready features rather than just inherited an audit posture.
• History of doing whatever work is necessary in service of shipping — testing, on-call, deployment automation, documentation, customer support. No work is beneath you when the function depends on it.

You could be a great fit if:

• You have the instincts of a founder — you would have started a company yourself, and the only reason you didn’t is that you chose instead to come build a function inside one already finding product-market fit. You think about leverage, customer outcomes, and unit economics naturally, not because anyone asked you to.
• You believe data products live or die on the quality of the underlying data and the speed at which it reaches the customer. You’d rather ship a narrower product with real-time freshness than a broader one running on stale batch cycles.
• You believe leading a team means modeling the work — the highest-leverage code you ship is also the technical bar the team operates against.
• You’re comfortable doing whatever is needed to ship: customer requirements one hour, schema design the next, debugging in production after that, writing the board update at the end of the day.
• You’ve built your career inside regulated, operationally complex B2B environments and care about the craft of making them feel simple.
• You’re energized by ambiguity and want to define how a function operates rather than inherit a structure built by someone else.
• You enjoy the craft of customer experience through anticipating needs, communicating proactively, and making complex things feel inevitable.
• You’re motivated by fast growth and excited by the pace, autonomy, and opportunity that comes with an early-stage startup.
• You’re energized by the idea of helping introduce real innovation into an industry that has largely stood still for nearly three decades.
• You bring rigor to documentation, process, and follow-through and expect the same from your partners.

Why join us?

• Own a function where the platforms are already live and customers are already engaged — not a greenfield bet on whether something will work.
• Inherit a small data engineering team on day one. Build alongside them and shape what the function becomes.
• Work directly with the CTO; influence company strategy from day one.
• Join Vinyl’s core engineering organization in Mangaluru, working alongside the team building the rest of the platform.
• Competitive cash compensation, meaningful equity, and full benefits.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive cash compensation commensurate with experience and scope, calibrated against Indian Series A engineering and product leadership benchmarks
• Performance-linked variable bonus
• Equity-based compensation, denominated in USD at Series A pricing
• Comprehensive health insurance (self + family)
• Provident Fund and statutory benefits
• Flexible PTO
• In-office at Mangaluru engineering location