Senior Director, Data Engineering

Crate & Barrel is seeking a transformative Senior Director of Data Engineering to lead their data engineering organization. This role involves providing executive leadership, defining technology vision and strategy, and ensuring the successful delivery of scalable data platforms while fostering innovation and excellence in data utilization.

Responsibilities:

• Provide executive leadership and strategic direction for a multi-faceted Data Engineering organization spanning multiple product lines or technological domains
• Define and champion the long-term technology vision, data analytics and AI strategy, architecture, and roadmap, ensuring it aligns with and advances the company's strategic objectives, leveraging a comprehensive understanding of data platforms
• Lead and mentor a team senior data engineering leaders, cultivating an environment of excellence, innovation in data utilization and continuous growth
• Drive the execution of strategic data engineering initiatives, ensuring the successful delivery of highly scalable, reliable, and impactful data platforms
• Collaborate with C-level executives and other senior leaders across the company to influence overall business strategy and ensure tight alignment between data engineering and other functions, demonstrating the strategic value of data
• Oversee strategic workforce planning, talent acquisition, and organizational development to build and sustain a world-class data engineering team
• Champion a culture of innovation in data processing and technical excellence in data engineering, positioning the company as a leader in its data capabilities
• Represent the company's data engineering capabilities and vision to external and internal stakeholders, including key customers, partners, and industry analysts
• Anticipate and navigate complex technological and market shifts in data management, guiding the organization through periods of change and growth in its data
• Lead modernization of the enterprise data platform on Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery) and establish a scalable, secure, AI-ready data foundation
• Drive implementation of a Medallion Data Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) and reusable enterprise data products
• Own engineering standards for ELT/ETL, orchestration, CI/CD, DataOps, observability, testing, Infrastructure as Code, reliability, and cost optimization
• Partner with Data Governance, Enterprise Architecture and other teams to operationalize data quality, metadata, lineage, security, privacy, and master data standards
• Enable advanced analytics, machine learning, and Generative AI through trusted, governed, high-quality data assets
• Lead engineering teams responsible for batch and streaming pipelines, APIs, platform operations, cloud infrastructure, and production support
• Develop multi-year platform roadmaps balancing innovation, technical debt reduction, operational excellence, and business value
• Build and mentor a world-class engineering organization while fostering accountability and technical excellence

Requirements:

• 15+ years of data engineering experience
• 7+ years in management
• Exceptional executive leadership, strategic vision in data, and organizational development capabilities
• Deep and broad understanding of current and emerging data processing technologies, data architectural paradigms (e.g., data mesh, data lakehouse), cloud-native data, and engineering best practices for data
• Outstanding business acumen and financial literacy, with experience managing significant budgets and linking data investments to tangible business outcomes and strategic value
• Superior communication, negotiation, and influencing skills, with the ability to build strong relationships and drive alignment at the executive level on data strategies
• Demonstrated success in building, scaling, and leading high-performing, geographically distributed data and machine learning engineering teams
• Expertise in driving large-scale data transformation initiatives and fostering a culture of innovation in data utilization, agility in delivery, and operational excellence in data systems
• Ability to think strategically about long-term industry trends in data and translate them into actionable data engineering strategies
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to make critical decisions in complex and ambiguous data situations
• Proven track record of developing and mentoring senior data engineering leaders
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field
• Proven track record of defining and executing enterprise-wide data strategy that drives significant business impact and advancements in data capabilities