Director, Data Platform & Governance

AHEAD; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

AHEAD is seeking a Director of Data Platform to build, run, and own a unified Data Platform Team and operating model. You will lead Snowflake architecture, data governance, access control, and data product publishing, while shaping ingestion patterns, medallion processing, and event streaming across the enterprise.

The role combines hands-on architectural authority with executive leadership, responsible for platform strategy, cost governance, and enterprise data policy within a cloud-first

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years in data engineering, platform engineering, data architecture, or related tech roles.
• At least 5 years in a leadership role overseeing platform strategy, architecture, and teams.
• Proven experience architecting and operating modern enterprise data platforms in cloud environments.
• Strong hands-on Snowflake experience: architecture, performance, security, workload management, FinOps.

Responsibilities

• Own Snowflake architecture, environments, security, scalability, and ops.
• Lead enterprise data governance vision, ownership, stewardship, metadata, lineage, and policy.
• Define and enforce authentication/authorization standards at the connection layer.
• Own platform FinOps, cost governance, budgeting, and optimization.
• Oversee ingestion standards for batch, CDC, streaming, and events.
• Manage medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold) and data product publishing.
• Drive data product documentation standards and self-service catalog.
• Oversee event streaming/messaging infrastructure and domain contracts.

Skills

Leadership

Data governance

Platform strategy

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Snowflake

Job description

AHEAD is seeking a Director of Data Platform to build, run, and own a unified Data Platform Team and operating model. You will lead Snowflake architecture, data governance, access control, and data product publishing, while shaping ingestion patterns, medallion processing, and event streaming across the enterprise.

The role combines hands-on architectural authority with executive leadership, responsible for platform strategy, cost governance, and enterprise data policy within a cloud-first