Director, Analytics, Data Engineering

• Job Title: Director, Analytics, Data Engineering
• Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States (4 days in office)
• Type: Full Time

Our Client is seeking a highly experienced Director of Data Engineering (Architecture) to lead the vision, design, and governance of a modern enterprise data ecosystem. This is a strategic leadership role responsible for shaping scalable, secure, and high-performance data platforms that enable advanced analytics, data science, and business intelligence capabilities.

This role will serve as the senior technical authority for data architecture, driving best practices across ingestion, transformation, storage, governance, and activation layers while aligning closely with business and technology leadership.

• Key Responsibilities
• Define and drive enterprise data architecture strategy, including cloud platforms, pipelines, and governance frameworks
• Design and oversee data warehouse/lakehouse platforms, ingestion pipelines, and distributed processing systems
• Establish standards for data modeling, orchestration, CI/CD, code quality, and observability
• Ensure scalability, high availability, performance optimization, and cost efficiency across cloud environments
• Embed data governance, security controls, and compliance into architectural design
• Partner with data science, analytics, engineering, and product teams to deliver scalable solutions
• Evaluate emerging technologies and lead proof-of-concepts and innovation initiatives
• Mentor senior engineers and influence architectural decisions across teams
• Communicate architecture strategy, risks, and roadmaps to executive stakeholders

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred)
• 10+ years in data engineering, distributed systems, or enterprise architecture
• 5+ years designing large-scale cloud-based data platforms
• Proven experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives
• Exposure to high-volume data environments preferred

• Preferred Certifications
• AWS / Azure / GCP Cloud Architect
• Snowflake or equivalent platform certification
• Certified Data Management Professional (CDMP)
• TOGAF or similar

• Technical Skills
• Cloud-native data architecture
• Data warehouse / lakehouse platforms
• Distributed computing (Spark)
• Data orchestration tools
• API-based integrations
• CI/CD for data platforms
• SQL, Python/PySpark, Infrastructure-as-Code

• Core Competencies
• Strong systems thinking and architecture design expertise
• Ability to influence without direct authority
• Excellent communication with technical and business stakeholders
• Strategic mindset with focus on scalability and future growth