Director, Data Platform

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

📋 Description

• Lead and manage AHEAD’s integrated Data Platform Team, platform, and operational model.

• Take ownership of governed domain connections that provide curated reads, operational actions, and event-stream subscriptions.

• Oversee Snowflake architecture, including security, workload management, performance optimization, lifecycle management, and system resilience.

• Direct enterprise data governance focusing on ownership, stewardship, quality, metadata, lineage, cataloging, retention, classification, and policy enforcement.

• Establish processes for authentication, authorization, access rights, self-service discovery, and use-case approval.

• Manage FinOps, budgeting, spending visibility, chargeback/showback policies, unit economics, and cost optimization strategies.

• Set ingestion standards for batch processing, CDC, streaming, and event-driven sources.

• Control the Bronze–Silver–Gold medallion architecture, transformation standards, testing, and reconciliation processes.

• Oversee the data product lifecycle, including documentation, cataloging, federated contribution models, discoverability, and self-service consumption.

• Manage event streaming and messaging infrastructure, including event contracts, schemas, topics, retention, ordering, access rights, and integration with ingestion pipelines.

• Recruit, structure, and lead teams focused on platform engineering, data governance, data products, and event infrastructure.

• Architect governed write-back and event-emission patterns for systems, workflows, and AI agents.

• Collaborate with teams in Engineering, Architecture, Product, Security, and application development.

• Develop standards for monitoring, incident response, disaster recovery, service levels, and platform resilience.

• Own the strategic roadmap and effectively communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, business impacts, and investment priorities to executives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

• A minimum of 12 years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or related technology roles.

• At least 5 years in a leadership role responsible for platform strategy, architecture, and leading engineering teams, including building a team or function from scratch.

• Proven experience in architecting and operating modern enterprise data platforms within cloud environments.

• Strong practical experience with Snowflake, encompassing platform design, performance optimization, security, workload management, and FinOps/cost governance.

• Background in designing and implementing data governance programs that address ownership, stewardship, quality, metadata, lineage, cataloging, classification, and policy enforcement.

• Experience in creating access and authorization models for data platforms that support role-based, application-based, and AI-agent access.

• Knowledge of batch processing, CDC, and streaming ingestion patterns, along with Bronze/Silver/Gold processing architectures.

• Familiarity with event streaming and messaging infrastructure, such as Kafka or MuleSoft, including event schema governance, topic design, retention policies, and integration with data-platform ingestion pipelines.

• Experience in developing data-product publishing programs, documentation standards, catalog design, and self-service consumption models.

• Experience in building or enabling platforms that support AI, intelligent automation, or agent-based workflows.

• Strong background in designing governed write-back or operational integration patterns.

• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management capabilities.

• Ability to connect technical architecture decisions with business value.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary ranging from $180,000 to $210,000 per year.

• Flexible remote work arrangement.