About BukuWarung

BukuWarung is building the digital and financial infrastructure for micro and small businesses in Southeast Asia. We empower millions of MSMEs through payments, credit access, and financial tools - helping them grow faster and more securely.

Why This Role Matters

BukuWarung already serves millions of MSMEs, with payments, credit, and bookkeeping at scale. The next frontier is to make data the company's strongest competitive edge: powering real-time decisions, reducing fraud, expanding credit access, and personalizing products for millions of underserved entrepreneurs.

As Head of Data, you will transform a 5-person team into a strategic growth engine, deploying AI across operations, CX, and risk, while pioneering innovation with voice, video, and alternative data.

Driving financial inclusion & providing access to capital to underbanked & unbanked MSMEs is one of our key goals. This role will drive building in-house underwriting models for MSMEs across sectors & sizes, relying on both our existing ecosystem and external alternative data to help us achieve that goal.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

Define and execute a data strategy tightly aligned with GTM, personalization, underwriting, and revenue growth
Embed data into decision-making across product, engineering, risk, finance, and GTM teams

Credit, Risk & Fraud

Build advanced credit underwriting models leveraging payments, ecosystem, and alternative data
Design a fraud and risk engine for near-real-time detection and intervention
Experiment with unstructured data (voice, video, image) for product and risk innovation

AI & Advanced Analytics

Drive AI adoption across functions (ops, CX, risk, product)
Lead innovation with voice, video, and alternative data signals to enhance personalization, underwriting, fraud detection, and customer engagement
Scale predictive and prescriptive ML models to drive efficiency and growth
Build a culture of experimentation (A/B testing, synthetic controls)

Data Infrastructure & Governance

Architect modern pipelines (streaming + batch) for low-latency decisioning
Build frameworks for compliance, governance, and data privacy in fintech
Ensure accuracy, reliability, and accessibility of data assets

Team & Organization Building

Scale the team into a high-performing organization and strategic partner
Hire and mentor world-class data, ML, and risk talent
Instill a culture of storytelling with data that drives executive and GTM action.

Requirements

8–12 years in data leadership, ideally in fintech (payments, lending, fraud/risk).
Hands-on expertise in payment flows, credit underwriting, fraud vectors, and AI/ML
Proficiency in Python, SQL, ML frameworks, streaming architectures (Kafka/Flink/Spark), and visualization tools.
Proven ability to link analytics to business growth and financial impact
Strong stakeholder management and communication skills
Familiarity with compliance, governance, and cross-border fintech data requirements.

Key Impact Areas (First 18 Months)

Build and launch next-gen credit underwriting models.
Deliver a fraud & risk engine that improves trust and reduces losses
Scale AI-led initiatives, including voice/video innovations across ops, CX, and product
Grow the data org into a strategic revenue enabler

Head of Data Analytics & Science (India - Hyderabad)