Senior Director, Data Platform Engineering

Coursera, a leading skills development platform, is seeking a Senior Director of Data Platform Engineering to define and execute the long-term vision for the company's data platform strategy. This role involves leading a global organization responsible for the architecture, reliability, scalability, security, and evolution of the enterprise data ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute a multi-year vision and roadmap for the company's enterprise data platform aligned with business and technology strategy
• Drive platform modernization initiatives supporting analytics, AI/ML, experimentation, and product innovation
• Establish engineering investment priorities and technology strategy in partnership with executive leadership
• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing global Data Platform Engineering organization, including senior managers, engineering managers, staff engineers, and principal engineers
• Recruit exceptional technical leaders while developing strong succession planning and leadership pipelines
• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, operational excellence, and continuous learning
• Own the architecture and operation of highly scalable cloud-native data platforms supporting petabyte-scale storage and processing
• Lead engineering efforts across batch processing, real-time streaming, metadata management, governance, platform tooling, and self-service infrastructure
• Champion modern engineering practices including Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, platform automation, observability, developer productivity, and platform reliability
• Partner with senior leaders across Engineering, Product, AI/ML, Analytics, Infrastructure, Security, and Finance to align platform investments with business priorities
• Serve as the executive sponsor for enterprise-wide data initiatives and influence technical direction across the company
• Represent Data Platform Engineering in executive planning, architecture reviews, and technology governance
• Establish KPIs and operational metrics for platform availability, scalability, adoption, reliability, performance, and cloud efficiency
• Drive continuous improvements in developer experience, self-service capabilities, security, compliance, and operational maturity
• Ensure the platform meets enterprise requirements for governance, privacy, and data quality
• Evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends to evolve the company's modern data architecture
• Enable AI-first platform capabilities that accelerate machine learning development and data product creation
• Promote technical excellence through architecture reviews, engineering standards, and technical mentorship

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed data platforms or cloud infrastructure
• 8+ years of engineering leadership experience managing managers and multi-level engineering organizations
• Demonstrated success building and scaling global engineering organizations supporting mission-critical platforms
• Proven experience defining and executing long-term technology strategies that align with business objectives
• Expertise in Databricks
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and modern data platforms
• Hands-on knowledge of technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Trino/Presto, Flink, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Airflow, or equivalent large-scale data technologies
• Strong understanding of data warehousing, streaming architectures, lakehouse platforms, metadata management, and data governance
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible), Kubernetes, container orchestration, CI/CD, and cloud-native infrastructure
• Strong understanding of platform observability, reliability engineering, security, and operational excellence
• Outstanding executive communication, organizational leadership, and stakeholder management skills
• Experience implementing enterprise data governance, privacy, compliance, and security programs
• Experience supporting modern lakehouse architectures and data mesh implementations
• Experience leading platform engineering organizations within consumer technology companies
• Experience managing globally distributed engineering organizations across multiple regions
• Demonstrated success influencing executive leadership and board-level technology strategy
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field