[Hiring] Director of Data Engineering @Attain Finance

Role Description

The Director of Data Engineering leads data engineering and database administration, with accountability for delivery, talent development, operational excellence, and enterprise data platform strategy.

• Manage cross-team dependencies, develop future leaders, and align platform priorities, investments, reliability, security, and cost with business goals.
• Provide technical direction across Apache Airflow, Python, and Snowflake while building an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture.
• Develop data engineering and database administration leaders through regular 1:1s, coaching, actionable feedback, career plans, delegated ownership, and succession planning for future managers and technical principals.
• Own the Snowflake budget, monitor usage, enforce cost controls, and keep spending within approved targets.
• Own hiring and onboarding, including role definition, interviews, and development of a diverse candidate pipeline.
• Own the multi-year data engineering and database platform roadmap, lead quarterly planning, manage cross-team dependencies, and make clear tradeoffs among delivery, technical debt, reliability, security, and cost.
• Set goals and expectations, prioritize work, and drive delivery with product, analytics, and platform teams.
• Set performance expectations, lead calibration and compensation input, address issues promptly, and implement timely, actionable improvement plans.
• Govern standards for coding, testing, documentation, deployment, incident management, and operational readiness; define KPIs and service levels; review trends; and drive improvements in delivery predictability, reliability, and resilience.
• Lead Snowflake warehouse architecture and data modeling, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
• Own data engineering and database administration outcomes; report delivery and operational performance to senior leadership; surface risks early; lead critical escalations and post-incident accountability; and reinforce ownership of results and corrective actions.
• Build trusted relationships across product, analytics, finance, security, and infrastructure; translate business needs into roadmaps, service commitments, and investment priorities; communicate risks and tradeoffs; and drive alignment without direct authority.
• Ensure data quality, lineage, and governance practices are implemented (monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis).
• Drive continuous improvement in CI/CD and DataOps practices for Airflow and Snowflake deployments.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of people management experience (hiring, coaching, performance management) leading engineers or data engineers.
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Airflow in production environments (designing DAGs, managing dependencies, scheduling, monitoring, and troubleshooting).
• Strong Python proficiency, including building and maintaining data pipelines and applying testing and code quality practices.
• Experience designing and operating solutions on Snowflake (schema design, ELT/ETL patterns, query optimization, and cost/performance considerations).
• Solid understanding of data modeling concepts (e.g., dimensional modeling), data quality, and pipeline reliability.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners (product, analytics, security, and infrastructure) and communicating tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Requirements

• Experience managing teams that support business-critical, high-volume data workloads with defined SLAs.
• Experience with modern ELT patterns and tooling (e.g., dbt) and strong SQL skills.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka/Kinesis) and near real-time pipelines.
• Familiarity with data governance, privacy, and security controls (RBAC, masking, auditing) in Snowflake.
• Experience improving developer experience through templates, shared libraries, and automation.
• Cloud experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including infrastructure concepts relevant to data platforms.

Benefits

• Base Salary: $155,000 - $200,000 USD.
• Flexible Paid Time Off Program.
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Disability, and other voluntary coverages.
• Eligibility to participate in our 401k program, starting on the first of the month following 30 days of employment with a company match.