Director, Data Engineering

Location: San Francisco, California, United States; in-person

Salary: $180,000–$190,000 median annual compensation for senior-level data engineering leaders; top-of-market packages may reach $440,000.

Company

hirify.global is a specialist executive search firm focused on leaders who help organizations navigate AI transformation.

What you will do

• Own the strategic roadmap for data platform architecture and engineering as data volume and complexity grow.
• Lead, mentor, hire, and develop data engineering teams while setting technical direction and delivery standards.
• Design and operate data pipelines, warehouses, lakehouses, and real-time processing systems for analytics, ML, and product teams.
• Partner with data science, analytics, ML engineering, and product stakeholders to align platform capabilities with downstream needs.
• Establish data governance, quality, security, schema, metadata, and access-control practices.
• Evaluate cloud services and data technologies, and own platform monitoring, incident response, reliability, and optimization.

Requirements

• 8+ years of data engineering experience, including at least 3 years in a leadership or architectural role.
• Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale data systems in AWS, GCP, Azure, or equivalent cloud environments.
• Strong SQL skills and proficiency in at least one of Python, Scala, Java, or Go.
• Experience with modern data tools such as Spark, dbt, Airflow, Kafka, Snowflake, BigQuery, or equivalent technologies.
• Proven ability to define scalable data governance, quality, and security practices.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain technical complexity to non-technical stakeholders.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent, in-person leadership opportunity.
• Candidate-network process for future relevant opportunities rather than one specific current opening.
• Focus on operational excellence, continuous improvement, and accountable delivery.