[Hiring] Director, Data Platform @Ahead

Role Description

The Director, Data Platform will build and run AHEAD’s Data Platform Team— a single, unified group accountable for every governed connection the enterprise exposes into its data domains. This is a build-and-run leadership role: the Director will stand up the team, the platform, and the operating model simultaneously, then own it on an ongoing basis.

The platform model centers on one governed connection per data domain — exposed as an MCP server, API, direct SQL connection, or event stream — with two backend lanes behind every connection:

• A read lane serving curated, AI- and analytics-ready data products.
• An operational lane serving approved enterprise actions and event-driven integration back into source systems.

This is a hands-on architectural and operational leadership role. The Director will be the senior-most technical authority on Snowflake, data governance, platform access and authorization, FinOps, ingestion, medallion architecture, data product publishing, and event.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• 12 or more years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or related technology roles.
• At least 5 years in a leadership role with responsibility for platform strategy, architecture, and engineering team leadership — including building a team or function from the ground up.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating modern enterprise data platforms in cloud environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with Snowflake, including platform design, performance optimization, security, workload management, and FinOps/cost governance.
• Experience designing and running data governance programs: ownership, stewardship, quality, metadata, lineage, cataloging, classification, and policy enforcement.
• Experience designing access and authorization models for data platforms, including role-based, application-based, and AI-agent access patterns.
• Experience designing data ingestion patterns across batch, CDC, and streaming sources, and medallion-style (Bronze/Silver/Gold) processing architectures.
• Experience with event streaming and messaging infrastructure — e.g. Kafka, MuleSoft, or equivalent — including event schema governance, topic design, retention policy, and integration with data platform ingestion pipelines.
• Experience building data product publishing programs, including documentation standards, catalog design, and self-service consumption models.
• Experience building or enabling platforms that support AI, intelligent automation, or agent-based workflows.
• Experience designing governed write-back or operational integration patterns that allow downstream systems, workflows, or agents to act safely on platform data.
• Strong executive communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align technical architecture decisions to business value.

Requirements

• Own the target-state Snowflake architecture: data organization, storage patterns, warehouse and workload segmentation, performance optimization, and lifecycle management.
• Set platform-wide standards for environments, security model, scalability, and operational resilience.
• Own the enterprise data governance vision, operating model, and leadership cadence.
• Lead the governance agenda across ownership, stewardship, quality, metadata, lineage, cataloging, retention, classification, and policy enforcement.
• Own the access-rights model that governs every domain connection.
• Own platform cost governance for Snowflake and the surrounding data estate.
• Own the standards and patterns for data ingestion into the platform.
• Own the Bronze → Silver → Gold processing model.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle for data products.
• Own the domain event streaming infrastructure.
• Build the Data Platform Team: recruit, structure, and lead a high-performing organization.
• Define and own the architecture for unified domain connections.
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, Product, and Security to ensure the platform is resilient, trusted, extensible, and aligned to enterprise priorities.
• Establish platform engineering standards for performance, resilience, monitoring, incident response, disaster recovery, and service-level expectations.
• Own the platform roadmap across foundational build-out, Snowflake optimization, governance maturity, event streaming infrastructure, and future-facing capabilities.
• Provide strong cross-functional leadership and executive communication.

Benefits

• $180,000 - $210,000 a year.