Director, Global Data Platform Engineering & AI Enablement

Waters Corporation; Milford (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Waters Corporation is seeking a Director of Data Platform Engineering to own and govern its global Enterprise Data Platform. You will design end-to-end platform architecture, lead a direct engineering team and a matrixed GCC team, and partner with data science, analytics, and business stakeholders to enable AI-ready data assets and enterprise BI.

This is a hands-on leadership role with responsibility for reliability, governance, and cost efficiency across a regulated life-sciences environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years hands-on data platform engineering or data architecture experience
• 5+ years in a senior or lead role with direct team responsibility
• Deep Databricks expertise: Unity Catalog, workspace administration, compute governance, Delta Lake
• Enterprise Power BI experience: semantic models, deployment pipelines, workspace governance, RLS
• Strong Terraform IaC proficiency with CI/CD integration and module design
• Proven ability to lead both direct and GCC/distributed engineering teams
• Cloud platform knowledge (Azure or AWS), IAM, networking, security patterns
• Working knowledge of AI/ML platform patterns and MLOps

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own end-to-end architecture of Waters' Enterprise Data Platform including Databricks Lakehouse, Power BI, and SAP touchpoints
• Lead Terraform IaC implementation (workspaces, Unity Catalog, compute policies, bindings, CI/CD) and author modules
• Govern Unity Catalog with fine-grained permissions, lineage, and audit controls under life-sciences compliance
• Drive Delta Lake architecture decisions, cluster optimization, and job orchestration across dev/stage/prod
• Partner with data engineering, analytics, and data science to ensure stable, cost-effective compute environments
• Build and govern a high-performance Power BI enterprise environment with semantic models, deployment pipelines, and RLS
• Bridge Databricks Lakehouse and Power BI consumption layer ensuring reliable, self-service models
• Define BI engineering standards including DAX, incremental refresh, and dataflow architecture
• Evaluate and implement AI/ML platform capabilities aligned with Waters' Data and AI strategy
• Establish Platform Operations: runbooks, SLAs/SLOs, observability, on-call and incident management
• Own GCC delivery model: work packages, QA standards, SLAs, onboarding for cross-timezone teams
• Lead platform governance: data classification, lineage, access controls, and audit trails
• Own cost of ownership for data platform: compute governance, Power BI capacity, FinOps
• Engage with vendors (Databricks, Microsoft, SAP) to leverage platform capabilities

Skills

Databricks

Power BI

Terraform

Unity Catalog

Delta Lake

MLOps

Cloud platforms

Platform leadership

GCC governance

Data governance

Tools

GitHub Actions

Azure

AWS

SAP integration

Job description

Waters Corporation is seeking a Director of Data Platform Engineering to own and govern its global Enterprise Data Platform. You will design end-to-end platform architecture, lead a direct engineering team and a matrixed GCC team, and partner with data science, analytics, and business stakeholders to enable AI-ready data assets and enterprise BI.

This is a hands-on leadership role with responsibility for reliability, governance, and cost efficiency across a regulated life-sciences environment.