Chief Data Architect & Strategy Leader

Kemin Industries; Des Moines (IA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Wellness & fitness benefits

Career development

Learning platform access

Community service opportunities

Job summary

Kemin Industries seeks a Director of Data to define and lead the enterprise data strategy, architecture, and governance. Success requires partnering with IT and business units to translate data investments into measurable value across analytics, AI, and BI initiatives.

In a hybrid work environment, you will steer platform choices (Databricks, Fabric) and set standards for data quality, trust, and usability across global operations, R&D, and finance.

Qualifications

• Education and experience: Bachelor's degree in data-related field with 10+ years of related experience.
• Strong executive communication skills; able to translate data strategy into business outcomes for non-technical leadership.
• Background in manufacturing, life sciences, chemicals, CPG, or other data-intensive environments.
• Demonstrated success improving data quality, trust, and usability across fragmented systems and legacy platforms.
• Experience partnering with IT architecture and engineering teams while setting enterprise data standards, priorities, and design expectations.
• Strong understanding of modern data platforms and their role in enabling analytics and AI.

Responsibilities

• Establish the enterprise data strategy and target-state architecture that supports analytics, AI, and decision-making use cases.
• Translate business priorities into clear data architecture and sequencing guidance.
• Define what analytics-ready and AI-ready data means and ensure alignment across teams.
• Define and maintain data standards, patterns, and design principles for structured and unstructured data.
• Chair or co-chair architecture governance forums to review designs and approve exceptions.
• Partner with IT to ensure platform decisions align with data strategy.

Skills

Executive communication

Data strategy

Stakeholder alignment

Leadership

Data governance

Modern data platforms

Platform knowledge (Databricks, Fabric

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Data Science, Computer Science, or Analytics

Tools

Databricks

Fabric

Job description

Kemin Industries seeks a Director of Data to define and lead the enterprise data strategy, architecture, and governance. Success requires partnering with IT and business units to translate data investments into measurable value across analytics, AI, and BI initiatives.

In a hybrid work environment, you will steer platform choices (Databricks, Fabric) and set standards for data quality, trust, and usability across global operations, R&D, and finance.