Director Data Management & Data Platforms

DIRECTOR, DATA MANAGEMENT the ability to apply consistent disciplines of governance, quality, architecture, operations, DevOps, cost management and scalability across all platforms is the primary leadership requirement. Key Responsibilities Data Platform Strategy communicate priorities, trade-offs and progress to executive audiences. Databricks Lakehouse (core platform) Own the Databricks environment end to end: workspace and Unity Catalog design, compute policies, Delta Lake standards, medallion (bronze/silver/gold) architecture, ingestion patterns and serving layers. Establish the engineering standards for pipelines (Delta Live Tables / Lakeflow, Workflows, notebooks, SQL warehouses) and drive adoption of Databricks as the central data product for analytics, integration and downstream applications. Oversee identity, access and lineage through Unity Catalog and Azure Entra ID integration; enforce least-privilege access to data assets. Manage Databricks platform operations: monitoring, job reliability, incident response, upgrades, capacity and DBU/cloud cost optimization. Data360 Master Data Management Provide leadership and oversight to the team running the Data360 MDM product, including product roadmap, release management, vendor relationship and service levels. Ensure golden-record definitions, match/merge rules, stewardship workflows and reference data standards are maintained and aligned with the enterprise data model. Integrate Data360 mastered data with Databricks, the enterprise warehouse and consuming applications so that mastered data is the single trusted source across platforms. Enterprise Data Environment (existing estate) Own and manage production and non-production data domains: PeopleSoft data integration, middleware, ETL (SSIS), nightly jobs and reporting components in each region. Understand the purpose and owning teams of every non-production region; ensure environments are properly configured, provisioned and refreshed; negotiate region usage with application teams. Accountable for installation, configuration, patching, monitoring and maintenance of all data management applications; troubleshoot application and ETL issues affecting the flow of data transactions. Work with the Data Architect and ETL development team to resolve production issues requiring development; champion upgrade recommendations. Enable data consumption through APIs and governed data products; provide business-facing communication for enterprise-level issues. Cross-Platform Disciplines (applied to SQL Server, Oracle, Azure SQL, Databricks, Data360 and any future platform) Governance publish quality metrics; lead root-cause and remediation efforts across source systems, MDM and the lakehouse. Architecture: Own the enterprise data architecture, data models, integration patterns and platform reference architectures; ensure new solutions conform to standards and legacy solutions have a defined path forward. Operational Excellence: Define SLAs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident and problem management, disaster recovery and change control for all data platforms; drive continuous improvement in reliability. DevOps forecast, monitor and optimize cloud consumption, licensing and vendor spend; implement chargeback/showback visibility and FinOps practices. Annual Budget Planning: Lead the annual budgeting process for data platform consumption costs (Databricks DBU/compute, cloud storage, licensing and vendor spend); build forecasts against usage trends and growth plans, and track actuals against budget throughout the year. Scalability lead capacity planning, performance tuning and workload placement decisions. People set goals, build skills (particularly Databricks) and plan succession. Vet, select and manage vendors and managed-service partners; negotiate contracts and hold partners to service commitments. Manage multiple customers, suppliers and priorities in a rapidly changing environment. JOB REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university with a major in Computer Science, Information Systems or related field; Master's degree preferred. Databricks certification (e.g., Data Engineer Professional or Platform Administrator) strongly preferred. 12+ years of progressive data management experience, including 7+ years managing teams and 3+ years leading managers or a multi-team function. 3+ years of hands-on and leadership experience with Databricks in a production enterprise environment (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Workflows, SQL warehouses, cost governance). This is the key technical requirement for the role. Demonstrated experience applying governance/security, data quality, architecture, operational excellence, DevOps, cost management and scalability practices consistently across multiple data platforms. Experience with Master Data Management concepts and platforms; Precisely Data360 (or comparable MDM such as Informatica, Reltio or Profisee) preferred. Experience with data lake / lakehouse and cloud data warehouse concepts; familiarity with Snowflake sufficient to lead a platform evaluation. Experience leading the operations of mission-critical systems and services globally, and supporting remote offices in a large-scale data environment. Experience managing data from a mix of on-premises, IaaS/SaaS and cloud-native applications. Experience owning a technology budget and driving measurable cloud cost optimization. Experience vetting, selecting and managing vendors. Experience working with and communicating with senior management to align IT roadmaps, strategies and priorities; excellent written, verbal and presentation skills. Experience with state-of-the-art Front and Back Office solutions for a global professional services business, with a preference for experience leading data design for a staffing and/or consulting firm. Background working within a staffing and/or consulting services company strongly preferred. Databricks on Azure: Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Delta Live Tables / Lakeflow, Workflows, SQL Warehouses, Photon, cluster and compute policies, cost monitoring required. Python, PySpark and SQL required. MS SQL Server 2019+, Oracle Database 19+, Azure SQL required. MS SSIS and enterprise ETL/ELT patterns required. Azure DevOps boards, CI/CD pipelines and repositories; Git-based workflows required. API-based data integration required. Azure platform services relevant to data: ADLS Gen2, Data Factory, Key Vault, Entra ID, Azure Monitor required. Precisely Data360 (MDM, Data Quality and Governance modules) preferred. Snowflake preferred. MS Fabric and Power BI preferred. ER/Studio or comparable data modeling tools preferred. Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep) and Databricks Asset Bundles preferred. Data quality, observability and catalog tooling (e.g., Great Expectations, Monte Carlo, Purview) preferred. Salesforce, Workday and PeopleSoft (as source/consuming systems for enterprise data integration) preferred. OUR COMPREHENSIVE BENEFITS Competitive Salary Health, Dental and Vision Insurance Health Savings Accounts (HSA) with Employer Contribution Flexible Spending Accounts Long and Short-Term Disability Life Insurance Voluntary Benefits Employee Assistance Program Paid Parental Leave Wellness Incentives Vacation and Holiday Pay 401(k) Retirement Plan with Employer Match Employee Stock Purchase Training and Advancement opportunities Tuition Reimbursement Birthdays Off Philanthropic Opportunities Referral Program Partial Gym Membership Paid Team Building Events Discount Programs Everforth Apex is an equal opportunity employer. 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