Sr Director, Data Platform & Analytics Engineering

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze®, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Early Warning follows a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose 

The Sr Director, Data Platform & Analytics Engineering is responsible for leading the engineering capabilities that power Early Warning’s enterprise data platform, governed data products, and enterprise and product analytics. The role will lead modernization of existing data and analytics platforms, accelerate adoption of the Enterprise Data Platform, and enable trusted, timely and scalable data consumption across business, product and analytics use cases.

This leader will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Data Governance and business teams to translate business outcomes into scalable data capabilities while ensuring existing critical data and reporting services remain reliable throughout the transformation.

Essential Functions 

• Define and execute the roadmap for modernizing legacy data and analytics platforms and progressively migrating data, pipelines and workloads to the Enterprise Data Platform.
• Establish scalable engineering patterns for ingestion, transformation, domain modeling, governed data products, analytics-ready datasets and consumption.
• Partner with Product and business leaders to translate business outcomes, KPIs and data requirements into prioritized engineering roadmaps and reusable data capabilities.
• Drive development of trusted Enterprise Data Products that support product, customer, operational and enterprise analytics use cases.
• Improve availability, quality and freshness of critical data, enabling more timely product and business insights.
• Ensure existing enterprise data, analytics and reporting capabilities remain reliable while modernization and migration are underway.
• Establish strong engineering practices across data quality, testing, reconciliation, lineage, observability, reliability, performance and cost management.
• Partner across Data Exchange, Product Engineering, MLOps, Architecture, Security, Cloud/Infrastructure and SRE to establish clear ownership boundaries and deliver end-to-end outcomes.
• Lead, develop and mentor engineering leaders and teams while establishing an outcome-oriented, product-based engineering operating model.
• Manage engineering capacity, priorities, vendor partnerships and investments against business and transformation priorities.
• Support the company’s commitment to risk management and protection of the integrity, security and confidentiality of data.

Minimum Qualifications: 

• 15+ years of experience across Data Engineering, Data Platforms, Analytics Engineering, Data Architecture, Business Intelligence or related engineering disciplines, with progressively increasing responsibility.
• 10+ years designing and delivering large-scale enterprise data and analytics solutions.·
• 5+ years building and directly leading high-performing data/platform engineering organizations and engineering leaders.
• Demonstrated experience defining and executing enterprise-scale data-platform or analytics modernization strategies and roadmaps.
• Experience delivering large-scale data solutions across cloud, on-premises and/or hybrid environments.
• Strong understanding of modern data engineering, data modeling, governed data products, analytics engineering and enterprise reporting/analytics architectures.
• Demonstrated ability to influence executives, Product, Engineering and cross-functional stakeholders and deliver through complex organizational dependencies.
• Experience managing significant engineering programs, capacity, budgets and external partners
• Background and drug screen. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience modernizing large-scale legacy/on-prem data environments to cloud-based data platforms.
• Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Spark/PySpark, Kafka and AWS, or comparable technologies.
• Experience building governed enterprise/domain data products and reusable data-platform capabilities.
• Experience with batch, streaming, API and file-based data integration patterns.· Strong understanding of domain/data modeling, data contracts, data quality, metadata, catalog, lineage and observability.
• Experience supporting operational data, enterprise analytics and product/customer analytics use cases.
• Experience modernizing legacy analytics/reporting environments without disrupting critical business consumption.
• Experience with BI/analytics technologies such as Tableau or comparable platforms.· Experience leading organizations through significant technology and operating-model transformation.
• Financial services, payments, fraud, identity or other highly regulated data environments preferred.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor. 

Physical Requirements 

Working conditions consist of a physical and virtual hybrid office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers. 

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation. 

The base pay scale for this position in:
Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $206,000 - $275,000.
San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $248,000 - $330,000.
Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness 

• Healthcare Coverage – Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.

• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.

• Paid Time Off – Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.

• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave

• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.