Director of Data Engineering

📋 Description

• • Vibe, Inc. is seeking a Director of Data Engineering to serve as the chief architect of its entire data ecosystem. This pivotal role involves owning the infrastructure responsible for ingesting terabytes of data daily, governing it effectively, and making it accessible to the Analytics, Machine Learning (ML), and Product teams. The position is critical for Vibe's strategic transition from a startup pace to establishing enterprise-level trust, particularly as the company builds its proprietary identity graph and data interoperability layer, Nebula, and stands up the ML platform essential for real-time bidding at scale. This is an opportunity to architect a rare and complex system involving identity resolution, data clean rooms, and privacy-safe partner data exchange, offering unique challenges not commonly found elsewhere.
• • The day-to-day responsibilities of the Director of Data Engineering are multifaceted and crucial for Vibe's data infrastructure. A primary focus will be architecting the data platform, which includes owning the technical design of Nebula, Vibe's identity graph, entity resolution pipelines, and data clean room integrations with major broadcasters. This involves defining the end-to-end data architecture that supports Analytics, ML, and real-time bidding systems. A key technical challenge will be solving for training vs. inference skew, ensuring that the data used for model training accurately reflects the data available at bid time. Furthermore, the role entails building the ML infrastructure, designing and deploying the ML platform components such as feature stores, model registries, and CI/CD pipelines for ML, enabling data scientists to deploy models to production seamlessly without infrastructure impediments. The goal is to own the "golden path" for data scientists, where code pushes automatically trigger model retraining and deployment. This bridges the gap between Data Engineering and Data Science, aiming to remove friction rather than merely documenting processes.
• • Leading governance without impeding progress is another core responsibility. This involves championing the transition to a security-first culture, encompassing SOC2 compliance, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and PII anonymization, all while ensuring that compliance measures do not become a bottleneck for engineering velocity. The approach is to build automated guardrails and policy checks that empower engineers to ship code quickly and safely, rather than implementing restrictive gatekeeping. The Director will also own data retention policies, access controls, and governance frameworks across more than 200 data assets. Additionally, the role requires owning infrastructure economics, including managing the Data Platform P&L, tracking unit economics, differentiating storage costs from ML training costs, and ensuring that expenditure scales proportionally with revenue. Optimization across a hybrid stack, including high-volume streaming (Kafka/Kinesis), log storage (S3/Athena), and GPU compute for ML training, will be essential. The ability to identify waste rapidly and distinguish between inefficiency and intentional growth investment is paramount.
• • The Director will also lead the Data Platform Engineering team, managing and growing its capabilities to meet the demands of shipping Nebula and the ML platform. This includes assessing current team strengths against future needs and fostering a culture where engineers embrace structure because it enhances their speed and efficiency, not due to mandatory directives. The company culture at Vibe is built on three core values: Impact, Ambition, and Urgency. Every goal is tied to a tangible business outcome, with a focus on thinking 10x and acting with immediate purpose. Individuals who thrive here own outcomes without constant direction, default to action, and prioritize results over mere effort. This is a high-performance environment that offers high-performance rewards, working alongside driven colleagues on challenging problems in a rapidly evolving market.
• • In this role, a successful candidate will have the opportunity to architect a rare and complex data ecosystem, shaping the data foundation of a category-defining company at a critical inflection point between startup agility and enterprise scalability. The position offers significant ownership, including P&L responsibility, architectural authority, and direct communication lines with the CTO and VP of Product, ensuring that decisions have a tangible impact and are implemented swiftly. The learning and achievement potential is substantial, involving deep engagement with cutting-edge technologies in identity resolution, data clean rooms, privacy-safe data exchange, and large-scale ML infrastructure. Candidates will gain invaluable experience in leading a team through significant architectural and infrastructural challenges, optimizing cloud costs, and implementing robust data governance in a high-growth, performance-driven environment. This role is ideal for a leader who wants to build something impactful, own critical systems, and accelerate their career in the dynamic streaming TV advertising sector.