Chief Data Officer

About ESTO

Founded in 2017, we are a fast-growing fintech company on a mission to make shopping and financial decisions effortless. By combining smart technology with customer-first thinking, we enable people to pay flexibly and businesses to grow faster.

As a team, we value ambition, ownership, and constant improvement. We move fast, think big, and build solutions that make a real impact on everyday lives.

About the role:

ESTO runs on data. Credit scoring, fraud detection, pricing, treasury, regulatory reporting and every product decision go through the data platform. The Chief Data Officer owns that platform end to end, sits on the leadership team and reports to the CEO.

This is a builder's executive role. You inherit a modern lakehouse stack and a team who run operations without hand-holding, and you take ESTO from a well-run data function to a company where models and AI agents make and improve decisions in real time. Not a CDO who manages from slides: you design architecture, review model code and ship with the team.

What You’ll Do:

• Own the data platform: architecture, cost and roadmap of a modern AWS lakehouse stack (Databricks, dbt, Prefect)

• Run machine learning in production: credit, fraud and pricing models in the live decision path, from feature platform to real-time serving, together with the Chief Credit Officer

• Make the data layer agent-ready: semantic layer, governed access, LLM-driven analytics and internal AI tools for every team

• Own model governance and regulatory data feeds, automated, audited and right first time

• Deliver the finance data: automated treasury feeds and the numbers behind investor and lender reporting

• Lead Data Engineering, Analytics and Data Science: set priorities, clear blockers, be the single point of contact for the rest of the company

• Be accountable for results: lower credit losses, higher approval rates, faster reporting, cheaper infrastructure

What We Expect:

• 7+ years in data and machine learning, including several years leading a data or ML function in lending, payments, banking or another regulated, decision-heavy business

• Hands-on today: production SQL and Python, PR reviews, pipeline debugging and model performance from the confusion matrix up

• ML models shipped to production that moved a business metric, ideally credit risk or fraud

• Deep experience with a modern cloud data stack (AWS, Databricks or equivalent, dbt, orchestration, near-real-time pipelines)

• Daily user of AI tools (Claude, Cursor or similar) with a clear view of where they help and where they fail

• Comfortable owning model governance in a regulated environment and defending it to auditors and regulators

• Direct, clear written English; you set priorities and say no with reasons

Show us what you've shipped

Tell us about one model or data system you put in production and what it changed for the business. A link beats a long CV.

Why You'll Love Working Here

• 28 days annual leave + public holidays + your birthday off, always
• Hybrid work with flexible hours
• Paid sick leave + 3 wellbeing days
• Modern, pet-friendly office in the heart of Tallinn
• Fully stocked kitchen: snacks, fruit & drinks
• Monthly Stebby allowance for sports & wellness
• Collaborative, multicultural team
• Regular events & offsites
• Room to bring ideas and make real impact

🌍 Equal Opportunity Employer
We value diversity and inclusion, and we're committed to a workplace where everyone feels welcome, has equal opportunities, and is treated fairly.