Director, Analytics Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Lead a team of 8 members and report directly to the VP of Data & Insights.

• Establish the strategic direction for the data organization and provide guidance on technical decisions.

• Collaborate with Data Engineering, Data Science, IT, and business leaders.

• Develop and maintain a reliable semantic model with governed metrics and business definitions.

• Create evaluation datasets and ground-truth datasets to assess answer quality and identify regressions.

• Implement telemetry for tracking semantic model and AI tool usage.

• Construct a model-selection harness to allocate work across LLMs while managing cost and quality.

• Oversee data modeling and curated datasets for self-service, encompassing ownership, data contracts, testing, and documentation.

• Define the AI data access strategy across BI, Claude, MCP servers, and Slack agents.

• Direct the enterprise BI and self-service tools strategy, focusing on evaluation, adoption, and cost management.

• Establish self-service capabilities, including Claude skills, documentation, and guided workflows.

• Develop company-wide data applications that integrate Snowflake data, APIs, AI-powered analysis, and enable write-back to Postgres or Snowflake.

• Set engineering standards for data application security, authentication, testing, deployment, and monitoring.

• Create a long-term roadmap and operating model that aligns with the company's strategic objectives.

• Recruit, mentor, and retain a high-performing team of 8 individuals.

• Act as the first customer for GitLab and GitLab Duo in data workflows and provide feedback to Product and Engineering.

⛳️ Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, or BI.

• 5+ years of experience in team leadership.

• 2+ years of experience managing managers or senior leads.

• Extensive knowledge in data modeling and semantic layers, including dbt Semantic Layer, Snowflake semantic views, LookML, or Cube.

• Proficient in dbt, including testing and CI/CD within a multi-team project environment.

• Practical experience in building LLM-powered data access, encompassing text-to-SQL, agents, MCP servers, evaluations, and telemetry for answer quality.

• Advanced proficiency with AI coding agents such as Claude Code.

• Expertise in SQL and substantial experience with Snowflake.

• Familiarity with Python.

• Strong background in data governance, including data quality, lineage, certified datasets, and access controls like RBAC, row access, and masking policies.

• Proven track record of leading cross-functional data initiatives from strategy development to adoption and measurable business outcomes.

• Experience with enterprise BI and self-service solutions at scale.

• Capable of using GitLab, excelling in an all-remote, asynchronous work environment, embodying GitLab's remote work competencies, and aligning with GitLab's values.

• Nice to have: experience with LLM routing or gateway tools and managing model costs.

• Nice to have: experience with Tableau, Omni, or a BI platform migration.

• Nice to have: experience in web app development, such as React and TypeScript, and with Postgres.

• Nice to have: experience managing finance or revenue-critical data.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits to support your health, finances, and overall well-being.

• Flexible Paid Time Off.

• Team Member Resource Groups.

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

• Growth and Development Fund.

• Parental Leave.

• All positions are remote.

• AI serves as a core productivity enhancer and daily workflow support.