Director, Data Engineering

📋 Description

• • Own and evolve Livefront’s emerging data practice—spanning data engineering, data science, machine learning, and advanced analytics—while acting as the primary technical authority and “player-coach” for Fortune-500 clients and high-growth startups alike.
• • Architect, build, and govern cloud-native data platforms on AWS, Azure, or GCP that ingest, transform, and serve petabyte-scale data with sub-second latency; choose the right mix of Databricks, Snowflake, Spark, Kafka, and serverless tooling to balance cost, performance, and security.
• • Lead end-to-end delivery of complex data initiatives: run discovery workshops, translate ambiguous business goals into crisp technical requirements, produce architecture and data-flow diagrams, estimate effort, staff teams, and personally commit production-grade Python and SQL when the stakes are highest.
• • Establish and enforce engineering standards for code reviews, CI/CD, automated testing, data observability, lineage, privacy, and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, SOC-2, GDPR); ensure every pipeline you ship is reproducible, monitored, and recoverable.
• • Mentor, manage, and inspire a distributed team of senior and staff-level data engineers through 1:1s, performance reviews, pair programming, and career-path planning; cultivate a culture of curiosity, psychological safety, and continuous learning that attracts top talent and retains them.
• • Partner with Client Partners, Product Strategists, and Design Leads to craft data-driven product visions, ROI models, and AI roadmaps; present to C-suite stakeholders, defend architectural choices, and secure buy-in for multi-year data investments.
• • Stay on the bleeding edge of AI/ML: evaluate new foundation models, vector databases, LLM orchestration frameworks, and responsible-AI tooling; run strategic spikes and proof-of-concepts that turn research into revenue-generating features.
• • Contribute to pre-sales scoping, proposal writing, and SOW negotiations; act as the authoritative voice in orals, white-boarding sessions, and security reviews to win deals valued from $500K to $5M.
• • Roll up your sleeves 30–40 % of the time to debug gnarly Spark jobs, optimize SQL queries, tune Databricks clusters, and model star schemas—demonstrating the craftsmanship you expect from the team.
• • Publish thought leadership: commit to at least two public talks or long-form articles per year, mentor engineers on open-source contributions, and represent Livefront at meetups and conferences.
• • Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring and team rituals; actively participate in recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding to keep Livefront’s culture exceptional.
• • Track record of turning data into dollars—whether by enabling real-time personalization for millions of Target guests, reducing churn for a SaaS unicorn, or unlocking new revenue streams for a healthcare giant—while keeping systems secure, compliant, and performant.