Lead IT Data Engineer (SQL/Python)

The Lead IT Data Engineer owns and drives the organization's data strategy, setting the technical direction for data engineering, enterprise data modeling, and agentic AI adoption. This role is responsible for platform architecture, tool selection, cloud strategy, budget and capacity planning, and the design of enterprise AI agent systems — all while establishing governance frameworks for responsible data and AI practices and mentoring the engineering team.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Own and drive the overall data strategy, including the multi-quarter technical roadmap, platform architecture, and data engineering standards.

Architect end-to-end data solutions across cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), setting standards for orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), transformation (dbt), streaming (Kafka, Flink), and storage (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Snowflake, BigQuery).

Own the enterprise data modeling strategy — crafting scalable models using dimensional, multi-dimensional, and advanced normalization techniques, with enterprise-wide documentation and metadata governance.

Define API design standards and data contracts to ensure reliable, well-governed interfaces between data producers and consumers.

Establish enterprise-level data governance, security, and compliance frameworks across all data and AI systems, including access controls, cataloging, and lineage.

Define and enforce CI/CD standards for data pipelines, containerized architectures (Docker, K8s), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).

Drive data observability practices and platform reliability at enterprise scale.

Drive build-vs-buy evaluations for data and AI tools, considering TCO, vendor lock-in, scalability, and organizational fit; manage vendor relationships.

Own or co-own infrastructure budget and capacity planning for data platform resources; optimize cloud costs at the organizational level.

Define and drive the organizati