Director, Data & AI Innovation

Ascend Learning; Gilbert (AZ); Hybrid; USD 171,000 - 244,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid time off and parental leave

Employee assistance program

Headspace and Airvet wellness programs

Charitable matching program

Job summary

Ascend Learning, NASM brand, seeks a Director of Data and AI in a hybrid Gilbert, AZ role. You will own the Snowflake data platform, establish AI governance, and lead production ML/AI initiatives that drive personalization and enterprise analytics.

This leadership role partners with product, architecture, and MSP-delivered teams to deliver scalable data-enabled experiences. The position requires a strong track record in building data platforms, managing teams, and delivering measurable business

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data/analytics/AI/ML
• 4+ years of people management
• Experience building a data platform on Snowflake
• Production ML/AI deployments incl. MLOps
• Data governance and privacy knowledge
• Azure cloud experience preferred

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the Data and AI team.
• Own NASM’s Snowflake estate including data contracts and security.
• Evolve the modern data stack: ingestion, transform, orchestration, semantic layer, BI tooling.
• Define and execute AI/ML strategy with measurable business value.
• Establish AI governance and responsible AI practices.
• Drive AI-first enablement for product, analysis, architecture, and operations teams.
• Partner with Architecture to align data platform with enterprise standards.
• Set operational metrics for data quality and model performance.

Skills

Executive communication

Leadership

Data governance

AI governance awareness

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Stats/Engineering

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

Snowflake

Azure AI Foundry

Power BI/Tableau/Looker

Job description

Ascend Learning, NASM brand, seeks a Director of Data and AI in a hybrid Gilbert, AZ role. You will own the Snowflake data platform, establish AI governance, and lead production ML/AI initiatives that drive personalization and enterprise analytics.

This leadership role partners with product, architecture, and MSP-delivered teams to deliver scalable data-enabled experiences. The position requires a strong track record in building data platforms, managing teams, and delivering measurable business