POSITION PURPOSE AND SUMMARY
The Director, Data and Analytics, is accountable for the delivery and ongoing operation of ESA's enterprise data platform. The role converts an approved platform roadmap into working, supported production capabilities, including ingestion from source systems, curated and modeled data across medallion layers, governed access, and the analytics assets the business runs on. Accountability does not end at go-live. This leader owns the platform in production, including its reliability, cost, data quality, and the technical debt the team creates.
The team is small and senior by design. The Director leads a Senior Data Engineer and a Technical Lead who coordinates offshore engineering and works day-to-day with implementation partner and offshore engineers. Leverage in this role comes from engineering judgment and delivery discipline rather than headcount. The expectation is that this leader is in the detail with the team, participating in design reviews, release readiness activities, and root cause analysis, rather than collecting status and passing it upward.
The technical environment is a Databricks Lakehouse on AWS, with Lakeflow declarative pipelines, medallion layering, Kimball dimensional and data vault modeling, Unity Catalog governance, and Tableau for business intelligence. A legacy Snowflake environment supports private equity sponsor reporting and is under evaluation for consolidation. A multi-year platform program is underway, integrating ADP, central reservation system APIs, S3 file delivery, business-maintained spreadsheet feeds, and master data.
ESA is actively applying artificial intelligence to how the data team works and to how the business reaches data. Current and near-term work includes AI-assisted engineering and code review, agentic development patterns, automated data quality detection, and natural language access to governed data through Databricks Genie. This is offered as something the person in this role will get to shape and direct. Prior AI experience is not expected and is not a requirement of the position. Interest is enough.
MAJOR / KEY JOB DUTIES
The primary responsibilities of this position are:
Delivery Accountability
- Converts the approved data platform roadmap into a sequenced, resourced, estimated delivery plan, and maintains that plan accurately enough to state at any time what is on track, what is at risk, and what the recovery path is, without preparation time.
- Owns end-to-end delivery of platform releases from design through production readiness, cutover, and stabilization.
- Personally participate in release readiness and go / no-go reviews, confirm that acceptance criteria were met as written, and hold a release when they were not
- Maintains sprint discipline across internal, offshore, and partner resources, including a groomed and estimated backlog, committed sprint scope, visible progress, and honest reporting of carryover.
- Verifies that delivered work matches the design intent rather than accepting completion at face value, and drives rework where it does not.
Technical Leadership
- Participates directly in solution design and design review for ingestion patterns, medallion layer boundaries, dimensional and data vault models, orchestration, and approve or reject designs with stated reasoning.
- Reviews data model changes, pipeline designs, material code changes, and defend the position taken in review.
- Leads root cause analysis on production data incidents through to documented findings and corrective actions rather than to a restart.
- Establishes and enforces engineering standards covering source control, environment promotion, testing, idempotent and re-runnable loads, deployment automation, and documentation.
- Makes platform performance and cost decisions on measured evidence, including compute sizing, job scheduling, storage and file layout, cluster policy, and be able to show the measurement behind the decision.
Production Ownership
- Owns the platform in production including pipeline reliability, data freshness against agreed service levels, incident response, and remediation of accumulated technical debt.
- Serve as the escalation authority for production data incidents, including outside standard business hours when severity requires it.
- Maintains an accurate operational picture of what is running, what is failing, what is degraded, and what the platform is costing.
Data Quality and Governance
- Defines and operates the data quality program, including expectations at each layer, automated validation, measurement against targets, published quality metrics, and a triage path for failures.
- Owns operational governance of the platform, including the Unity Catalog access model, data classification and sensitive data handling, lineage, and certification of curated datasets for business use.
- Partners with enterprise governance, information security, audit stakeholders on policy, and implement that policy in the platform.
Team, Partner, and Vendor Leadership
- Leads, coaches, and develops the onshore team, including recruiting, setting expectations, giving direct feedback, and managing performance.
- Establishes effective working overlap and collaboration with offshore and partner engineers and holds partner deliverables to the same standard as internal work
- Manages implementation partner and vendor performance against statement-of-work scope, deliverable quality, rate, validate invoices against contracted terms, and escalate variance.
Planning and Stakeholder Management
- Owns capacity and resource planning for the data platform, builds the forecast that supports the annual technology plan, and manages delivery within approved spending.
- Represents the data platform to business, finance, and executive stakeholders, bringing positions and recommendations rather than waiting to be asked, and communicating problems early.
- Translates business questions into platform requirements and push back with reasoning on requests that the underlying data will not support.
- Contributes to and help shape the practical application of AI within the team's engineering practice and in how the business reaches data.
OTHER DUTIES
- Participate in enterprise architecture review and technology standards discussions
- Support audit, information security, and compliance requests related to the data platform
- Provide input to technology vendor selection and contracting for data platform capabilities
- All other duties as needed or required