Director, Data Engineering (US)

Location: New York City, NY, US

Salary: $185,000–$240,000 per year; the range spans multiple levels, with actual compensation depending on skills, experience, budget, and location.

Company

Digital-first creative agency combining technology and creativity to solve consumer and business problems and establish new capabilities for clients across global markets.

What you will do

• Own the vision, architecture, technical strategy, and roadmap for the data platform, tying platform development to measurable business outcomes.
• Design and scale systems that collect, model, and activate data, turning data lakes into product backends for analytics, predictive models, and generative AI.
• Partner with agency leadership, client stakeholders, and the Machine Learning team on platform and data development.
• Select and standardize cloud data platforms and tooling, while setting engineering standards across Python, SQL, and modern data workflows.
• Lead AI-powered coding, agentic engineering, and AI-enabled workflow adoption across the engineering organization.
• Hire, mentor, and grow engineers and leads; contribute to budgets and roadmaps; represent the data organization to leadership and clients; and oversee governance, privacy, and security practices.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or adjacent disciplines, including 3+ years leading teams or technical organizations; experience designing and scaling data platforms from the ground up.
• Ability to set technical strategy, connect it to measurable business outcomes, and prioritize and fund competing initiatives.
• Substantial experience activating latent company data lakes into data-driven product backends.
• Deep expertise in cloud data platforms and strong judgment in selecting platforms and tooling.
• Strong technical fluency in Python and SQL.
• Substantial experience with AI-powered coding, agentic engineering, and AI-enabled workflows, ideally including leading adoption across a team.
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, and growing engineers and leads and establishing engineering standards and best practices.
• Exceptional communication and influence across technical levels in a 50/50 Tech/Creative organization, including representation of the data organization to senior leadership and clients.

Nice to have

• Experience owning data governance, privacy compliance, and security programs.
• Working knowledge of marketing data ecosystems, including GA4, advertising platforms, CRMs, and CDPs.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into data pipelines and shipping generative AI applications to production.
• Agency or consultancy experience balancing client-facing delivery with internal platform investment.

Culture & Benefits

• Work across a global agency network with teams distributed across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.
• Collaborate in an organization composed of approximately 50% engineering and 50% creative talent.
• Support a global client roster spanning technology, consumer goods, financial services, travel and hospitality, government, education, media, and publishing.