Vice President – Data Platforms

Lever, Inc.; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 350,000 - 550,000; Full time

Job summary

Aldar is seeking an experienced data-platform leader to own the Group's data backbone, driving ingestion, storage, modeling, governance and AI-ready foundations across the organization.

You will establish end-to-end accountability from platform engineering to operations, enable self-service analytics for Group Digital and business units, and ensure secure, scalable data services with cost discipline.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10-12+ years in data platform engineering or data architecture leadership.
• Experience leading a data platforms team in a large, complex org.
• Strong governance, data quality and security discipline.
• Bachelor's degree required; master's preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve group data platform architecture across ingestion, storage, modeling, processing.
• Lead data engineering, ingestion, governance, and self-service capabilities.
• Build AI-ready foundations and support analytics and AI use cases.
• Drive FinOps and cost discipline for data services.

Skills

Leadership

Architectural depth

Data governance

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Master's degree is preferable

Tools

Cloud data platforms

MLOps

Data governance tooling

Job description

JOB PURPOSE

Own the data backbone of the Group: the platforms through which data is ingested, stored, modeled, governed and made available for analytics, Artificial Intelligence and operational use across Aldar and its subsidiaries.

Establish end-to-end accountability from data platform engineering to operations, building AI-ready foundations and a self-service model that lets Group Digital and the business consume trusted data at speed, without the data platform becoming a bottleneck.

Serve Group Digital's Data & AI teams with data and self-service capabilities; analytics and data science ownership remains with Group Digital.

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Data Platform Strategy & Architecture

Define and evolve the Group data platform architecture: ingestion, storage, modeling, processing and serving layers.

Design for reuse, scalability, security-by-design and cost efficiency across the Group and subsidiaries.

Build AI-ready foundations: pipelines, data products and platform capabilities that support advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence use cases.

Data Engineering & Ingestion

Own data ingestion from enterprise and subsidiary source systems into the Group data platform, with reliable, monitored pipelines.

Set engineering standards for data pipelines, data products and platform automation.

Ensure database management and storage planning support performance and growth.

Platform Data Governance & Quality

Implement platform-level data governance: data principles, cataloguing, lineage, quality monitoring and access controls.

Safeguard master data alignment and data reliability for downstream consumers.

Partner with Information Security on data protection controls across the platform.

Serving Group Digital & Self-Service

Serve Group Digital's Data & AI teams with data and self-service capabilities, with clear interfaces and service commitments.

Enable governed self-service for business and subsidiary teams, balancing autonomy with control.

Provide centralized observability of data flows supporting digital products.

Operations & Reliability

Ensure availability, performance and cost discipline of the data platform in production.

Establish monitoring, incident management and capacity planning for data services.

Drive FinOps discipline on data platform and storage spend.

Leadership & Talent Development

Build and lead the Data Platforms team, including data platform and database management capabilities.

Develop data engineering depth and support Emiratization objectives.

What This Role Is Not

Not an analytics or data science role; those capabilities are owned by Group Digital.

Not a reporting or Business Intelligence delivery function; the role provides the platform others build on.

Not limited to Aldar corporate; the platform serves the Group and its subsidiaries.

This role owns the data backbone on which the Group's analytics and Artificial Intelligence ambitions are built.

RELATED YEAR OF EXPERIENCE

Minimum of 10-12+ years in data platform engineering or data architecture leadership within large, complex organizations.

YOE IN MANAGERIAL POSITION

Minimum of 2+ years of managerial experience in a related field.

FIELD OF EXPERIENCE

Enterprise data platforms at group or multi-entity scale, including cloud data stacks

Data engineering practices, data governance tooling and self-service enablement

Building AI-ready data foundations (pipelines, MLOps-adjacent capabilities) is an advantage

TECHNICAL AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

Engineering leader with architectural depth; credible with both engineers and executive stakeholders

Service mindset toward Group Digital and the business: the platform exists to be consumed

Rigorous on data reliability, governance and cost discipline

Comfortable operating at the boundary between technology platforms and digital product teams

QUALIFICATION

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field is required

Master's degree is preferable