Human Agency is looking to hire a Director of Data Engineering to stabilize and grow modern data platforms and lead AI-enabled outcomes across multiple client engagements. The role involves rotating across projects, potentially coordinating client data functions, performing hands-on engineering, reliability work, and AI implementation, requiring a blend of deep engineering craft and executive communication.
Requirements
- 7+ years in data engineering/analytics engineering with ownership of production pipelines and BI at scale.
- Demonstrated success owning and stabilizing production data platforms and critical pipelines.
- Strong grasp of modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake), orchestration (Airflow), and transformation frameworks (dbt or equivalent).
- Competence with data integration (ELT/ETL), APIs, cloud storage, and SQL performance tuning.
- Practical data reliability experience: observability, lineage, testing, and change management.
- Operates effectively in ambiguous, partially documented environments; creates order quickly through documentation and standards.
- Prior ownership of core operations and reliability for business-critical pipelines with defined SLOs and incident response.
Responsibilities
- Build, operate, and improve ELT/ETL pipelines across batch and streaming sources.
- Manage orchestration (e.g., Airflow), transformations, environments, and CI/CD for analytics code.
- Optimize warehouse performance (e.g., Snowflake) and cost.
- Implement monitoring/alerting, data quality checks, and tests with clear SLOs.
- Maintain lineage/metadata visibility and role-based access controls.
- Participate in an incident response rotation; maintain runbooks and postmortems.
- Establish change-management controls (versioning, approvals, environment promotion) for analytics code.
Other
- Coordinate across data engineering, analytics, and data science leads; run operating cadences, triage priorities, and manage releases.
- Map ownership and dependencies; reduce single points of failure; maintain a living service catalog and decision log.
- Lead transition planning and knowledge transfer with internal teams and vendors while sustaining delivery.
- Translate business needs into technical data solutions and clear option sets (impact, risk, effort).
- Facilitate discovery/working sessions; align requirements and prioritize tradeoffs.
