Director of Data Platforms

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director - Data Platforms & Architecture based in the United States.

• Lead multiple delivery teams and managers, maintaining strong team health, performance, engagement, workload balance, and alignment with organizational priorities.
• Coach and develop team members through regular feedback, career planning, stretch assignments, certifications, mentorship, and opportunities for increased visibility and responsibility.
• Oversee staffing and resource allocation across teams while balancing client needs, utilization, professional development, and sustainable workloads.
• Establish interview, performance, promotion, and talent-development standards and support consistent application across the organization.
• Represent teams in leadership forums, communicate strategic priorities, and surface organizational risks, opportunities, and patterns that should influence practice strategy.
• Lead architecture and technical strategy for large Azure programs and portfolios, ensuring solutions meet business objectives for security, scalability, reliability, performance, resilience, compliance, observability, and cost.
• Define modernization blueprints, reference architectures, system designs, standards, and reusable patterns across applications, platforms, data, and AI.
• Translate business and product strategies into cloud architecture roadmaps and execution plans with measurable outcomes and clear ownership.
• Guide major architectural decisions, resolve high-impact technical trade-offs, and ensure cohesive end-to-end architectures across multiple teams and workstreams.
• Define and own enterprise data platform strategy centered on Databricks or equivalent lakehouse architectures, covering ingestion, analytics, AI/ML, governance, security, workload isolation, streaming, batch processing, and data lifecycle management.
• Establish standards for Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog-aligned governance, multi-workspace and multi-region deployments, and integration with Azure-native services and complementary platforms such as Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI.
• Provide architectural oversight through design reviews, governance forums, and structured decision-making processes, while monitoring technical debt, architectural drift, quality, risks, and delivery dependencies.
• Promote modular design, automation, CI/CD, observability, testing, and strong non-functional requirements across delivery teams.
• Incorporate AI-assisted tools into discovery, architecture, development, testing, documentation, and analysis, helping teams adopt successful practices responsibly and consistently.
• Lead executive and senior stakeholder conversations around cloud modernization, data platforms, AI adoption, architecture strategy, and program roadmaps.
• Build trusted relationships with business and technology leaders, influencing priorities and investment decisions through clear communication of options, trade-offs, risks, and expected business value.
• Define discovery, architecture, and delivery frameworks that support predictable, incremental execution across multiple teams, time zones, and workstreams.
• Align teams around shared outcomes, APIs, integration contracts, ownership boundaries, operating models, backlogs, and release plans.
• Mentor Senior Architects, Delivery Architects, and senior engineers, strengthening systems thinking, architectural judgment, executive communication, and multi-team leadership capabilities.
• Create reusable learning and delivery assets, including reference implementations, architecture decision records, playbooks, modernization accelerators, landing-zone templates, workshops, and starter repositories.
• Support strategic growth by identifying opportunities within client accounts, developing executive relationships, contributing to pursuits, and shaping technical solutions, estimates, and program architectures.
• Partner with sales, account, and practice leaders to develop strategic proposals and identify follow-on opportunities involving platform extensions, modernization, AI, and data estate transformation.
• Champion modern cloud capabilities, automation, AI-assisted practices, and reusable delivery frameworks that improve quality, scalability, and delivery efficiency.

• 12+ years of experience delivering enterprise-scale solutions in areas such as application development, cloud platform engineering, DevOps, data, or analytics.
• 7+ years of experience in solution architecture and leading development or engineering teams, including multi-team or multi-workstream programs.
• 10+ years of experience in data platforms, data engineering, or consulting.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering.