Director of Data Engineering

About the opportunity

We support lead intelligence, audience development, and customer acquisition workflows across legal, financial services, insurance, e-commerce, and other markets.

We are seeking a hands-on Director of Data Engineering to lead engineers and own the architecture, roadmap, and reliability of governed data products. You will connect technical decisions with business outcomes, coach the team, and protect data quality and approved use across enrichment, segmentation, scoring, and activation workflows.

What you will do

• Own the data engineering roadmap; prioritize work with Product, Engineering, Growth, Operations, and Legal/Compliance using business value, capacity, and risk.
• Lead and develop data engineers through hiring, onboarding, coaching, delegation, and performance feedback; coordinate approved external contributors under appropriate engagement arrangements.
• Set architecture and engineering standards for ETL/ELT, data models, cloud infrastructure, warehouses, and reusable inference layers; remain involved in design and critical code reviews.
• Build enforceable controls for source approval, provenance, access, data lineage, quality, retention, deletion, and audit evidence in partnership with Legal/Compliance and security owners.
• Govern ZIP-, county-, and corridor-level scoring using approved aggregated historical signals; prevent prohibited real-time or individual incident tracking and unauthorized re-identification.
• Define service objectives, monitor freshness and quality, and lead incident response and root-cause reviews with assigned owners and sustainable coverage.
• Manage approved cloud, warehouse, and vendor budgets; forecast costs, review unit economics, and recommend resource or platform changes with documented tradeoffs.

What you bring

• Eight or more years of relevant data engineering or data platform experience, including production ownership of pipelines, models, and cloud data systems.
• Three or more years leading engineers through direct supervision, hiring, coaching, and delivery accountability; equivalent leadership responsibility may be demonstrated without a director title.
• Advanced SQL, strong Python, and the ability to assess designs and code while guiding engineers through technical decisions.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform and a production data warehouse or lakehouse; comparable platforms and transferable knowledge are accepted.
• Demonstrated architecture, ETL/ELT, orchestration, CI/CD, observability, incident management, and data-quality practices.

Additional qualifications

• Experience implementing governance, lineage, source permissions, retention, and privacy controls in production.
• Ability to manage priorities, technical costs, and distributed teams, and communicate tradeoffs clearly in English for engineering and stakeholder work.
• Availability for the approved full-time schedule during U.S. Eastern Time business hours, including daylight saving changes.

Helpful experience

• Geospatial aggregation, regional scoring, inference systems, audience development, ad-tech/mar-tech, or regulated data environments.
• Experience with dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Spark, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or comparable tools; familiarity with GitHub and ClickUp.
• Experience translating counsel-approved requirements under applicable privacy and marketing frameworks into technical controls.
• A degree in computer science, data engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; relevant cloud or data certifications are helpful.

How to apply

Apply with your resume and two public or anonymized examples: a data-platform or pipeline decision you owned, and a team leadership or delivery improvement. Describe scope, your contribution, and the outcome. Include work location, time zone, and availability. Do not share credentials, personal data, client records, or proprietary code without permission.

Shortlisted candidates may complete a paid assessment using a hypothetical architecture brief and synthetic data. Scope, estimated time, fee, and payment terms will be provided in advance.

Equal opportunity and accommodations

We make employment decisions based on job-related qualifications without unlawful discrimination or retaliation on account of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or other protected status. Reasonable accommodations for disability, religious practices, and pregnancy, childbirth, or related conditions are provided as required by law.