Director, Data Infrastructure

About the Role:

We are seeking a senior leader to own the architecture and operations of our centralized data infrastructure, enabling a federated data strategy across the company. You will be responsible for the systems and platforms that power analytics and AI use cases at scale from ingestion to transformation and governed access. This role will partner closely with cross-functional teams who own their own data products, but rely on a shared foundation for reliability, performance, and scalability.

What You'll Own:

• End-to-end ownership of the foundational data stack: Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, orchestration frameworks, observability, discoverability, and access management
• Design, implement, and evolve a scalable data infrastructure to support federated data product development across business units
• Lead implementation of ELT/ETL pipelines for analytical and AI/ML-driven use cases, ensuring data readiness for consumption
• Define and enforce governance, access control, and lineage across all levels of the data warehouse and transformation layer that allows federated teams to work without their data and approved data products while complying with security and legal best practices
• Proactively identify new opportunities to normalize data across the company, recommending data and broader systems projects to address data at the raw source when applicable and/ or normalize it within the warehouse across multiple functions, data sources, and end data products
• Build and maintain platform reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency standards and automation
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies — including ingestion frameworks, metadata and cataloging tools, and version control for data
• Act as a strategic partner to analytics, AI, and domain teams, enabling them to ship data products independently and securely
• Lead a proactive data evangelism program that identifies untapped raw data sources across OpenGov's functional teams, lands them in the central warehouse, and recommends high-impact data products that could be built atop that foundation
• Collaborate with stakeholders to socialize best practices, build alignment around architecture principles, and guide teams toward effective use of shared infrastructure
• Build and lead a small, high-performing infrastructure team while being willing able to roll-up your sleeves and solve the hardest data engineering challenges at OpenGov

What You Bring:

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or infrastructure roles, ideally with experience in platform or central ops environments

• Expertise with tools like Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, and orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, etc.)

• Snowflake is our current data warehouse provider and while we are open to evaluating others, we need to be convinced it won't work for our use case

• Strong understanding of cloud-native data architecture, multi-tenant models, and infrastructure-as-a-service principles

• Experience supporting analytical and AI/ML use cases, with an understanding of their data infrastructure needs
• Proven ability to scale platforms for federated and decentralized team structures
• Demonstrated success in program management, stakeholder alignment, and cross-functional influence
• Hands-on mindset with a bias for simplicity, clarity, and ownership
• Leadership experience

Nice to Have

• Experience operationalizing data governance and access control in federated orgs
• Familiarity with metadata, lineage, and discovery tooling (e.g., DataHub, Amundsen)
• Exposure to streaming systems, observability, and data privacy compliance (e.g., GDPR)
• Background in supporting AI/ML workflows and production-grade data pipeline