Director Data Engineering - Remote Schedule

CPI Card Group is hiring a Director of Data Engineering to lead its data engineering function and build, operate, and scale its cloud-native Databricks Lakehouse on AWS. The role leads the team, platform strategy and delivery, operations and governance, budget and vendor relationships, and technical standards, while supporting enterprise analytics and AI.

Responsibilities:

• Team Leadership and Organizational Development (25%) - Build, lead, and develop the data engineering team, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. Establish team structure, roles, and staffing plans (including contractor-to-FTE conversion), and cultivate a high-performing, accountable engineering culture. Set objectives, allocate work, and ensure the team consistently delivers against commitments
• Data Engineering Strategy and Delivery (25%) - Own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the enterprise data platform on Databricks and AWS, including the Medallion model (Landing, Bronze Raw, Silver Standardized, Gold Consumption/Aggregates/Semantic). Prioritize the portfolio of data initiatives, manage delivery timelines and dependencies, and hold the team accountable for reliable, on-time execution that anticipates future analytics, GenAI, and agentic AI workloads
• Platform Operations, Reliability, and Governance (20%) - Ensure the production data platform is reliable, secure, and cost-efficient, with clear SLAs, monitoring, and incident management. Oversee the governance model, including Unity Catalog administration, RBAC, data classification, lineage, and quality, ensuring compliance with SOX, PCI-DSS, and other regulatory obligations in partnership with the Data Governance Council and security leadership
• Budget, Vendor, and Stakeholder Management (15%) - Own the data engineering budget, including cloud spend, tooling, and consulting partners. Lead vendor evaluation, selection, and management, and make build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions. Partner with functional executives to align the roadmap to business priorities, and present strategy, progress, risks, and investment recommendations to senior and executive leadership
• Technical Direction and Standards (15%) - Set the engineering standards, reference architectures, and best practices the team follows, including Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), monorepo CI/CD (GitLab), and pipeline design patterns (PySpark, Delta)
• Provide senior technical direction and design review, guiding the Data Architect and engineers and serving as an escalation point for the hardest technical problems
• Sponsor enterprise master data management (MDM), including the Unique Customer ID (UCID) program
• Ensure the data platform and migration strategy support the future Acumatica ERP implementation
• Champion the company's AI enablement agenda, including reusable data/AI platform capabilities and AI Office Hours
• Contribute to workforce planning, headcount business cases, and organizational design for the broader Business Technology and Data function

Requirements:

• Strong technical foundation in SQL, Python, PySpark, data modeling, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as- Code, sufficient to lead architecture decisions and earn the trust of a senior engineering team
• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent and build a high performing team culture
• Excellent leadership, communication, and influence skills, with a proven track record aligning engineers, executives, and cross-functional partners
• Strong delivery discipline - planning, prioritization, and execution across concurrent initiatives and shifting priorities
• Sound business judgment on budget, vendor, and build-vs-buy decisions
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related quantitative field
• 12+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data platform, or data architecture roles
• 4+ years of experience directly managing and building engineering teams, including hiring and performance management
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Databricks (Lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog) and AWS at enterprise scale
• Demonstrated ownership of platform delivery and operations in a regulated environment (SOX,PCI-DSS, or similar)
• Proven experience owning a budget and managing vendor/consulting partner relationships
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S
• We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time
• Databricks and/or AWS professional-level certifications preferred
• Master's degree preferred