Data Platform Leader: AI-Driven Analytics & Strategy

Alpaca; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Alpaca seeks a Head of Data Platform to lead Platform Engineering, own data strategy, and drive the roadmap for a data‑driven organization. You will balance hands‑on architectural decisions with people leadership across multiple time zones.

You will oversee data lakehouse platforms and analytics products, influencing invoicing, revenue attribution, and regulatory reporting while delivering self‑service analytics and AI‑enabled data capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering with 3+ years leading data teams
• Deep experience with modern data stack and cloud storage
• Hands‑on ETL/ELT at scale: CDC (Debezium/Kafka), batch (Airflow/dbt), streaming, reverse ETL
• Track record of building self‑service analytics for non‑technical stakeholders
• Experience with financial data: invoicing, revenue attribution, or regulatory reporting in fintech or financial services
• Proficiency in Python and SQL; able to read code, review PRs, and guide architecture decisions
• Experience managing distributed/remote teams across time zones
• Strong stakeholder management: translate executive priorities to engineering execution
• Experience with GCP (GKE, GCS, BigQuery migration), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform

Responsibilities

• Lead Platform Engineering & ETL teams and set priorities
• Own Data Lakehouse architecture: Trino, Iceberg, GCS, Airflow, Airbyte, Redpanda/CDCs, dbt
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions on tooling
• Ensure invoicing logic is versioned, reproducible, and scalable with pricing changes
• Deliver embedded analytics via warehouse data to partners and reporting pipelines
• Coordinate data impact analysis for product launches across downstream datasets
• Advance self-service analytics via semantic layers and data catalogs
• Guide AI/ML enablement including enterprise AI search and LLM analytics
• Collaborate with Finance, Sales, Product, Compliance, and Customer Success to translate business needs into data products
• Manage data platform cost and on-call reliability (SLOs, incidents)

Skills

Data engineering

Team leadership

Python

SQL

Distributed teams

Tools

dbt

Trino/Presto

Apache Iceberg

Airflow

Airbyte

Kafka

Debezium

Kubernetes

GKE

GCS

BigQuery

Terraform

Job description

Alpaca seeks a Head of Data Platform to lead Platform Engineering, own data strategy, and drive the roadmap for a data‑driven organization. You will balance hands‑on architectural decisions with people leadership across multiple time zones.

You will oversee data lakehouse platforms and analytics products, influencing invoicing, revenue attribution, and regulatory reporting while delivering self‑service analytics and AI‑enabled data capabilities.