Director, Data Engineering

Have you ever had that green-light feeling? When you hit every green light and the day just feels like magic. CLEAR's mission is to create frictionless experiences where every day has that feeling. With more than 30+ million passionate members and hundreds of partners around the world, CLEAR’s identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or right on your phone, CLEAR connects you to the things that make you, you - unlocking easier, more secure, and more seamless experiences - making them all feel like magic.

We are looking for a Director of Data Engineering to lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of our data platform and pipelines. In this role, you will scale the high-performing data engineering team, partner closely with cross-functional leaders, and ensure our data is accurate, reliable, and available to drive critical business decisions. This is a senior leadership role with significant impact on how we collect, model, govern, and use data across the company.

What you'll do:

• Own the data engineering vision and roadmap, translating company and product strategy into clear platform priorities, investments, and tradeoffs.
• Design and scale a modern data platform spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving that supports batch, streaming, and real-time use cases.
• Define end-to-end data architecture and standards, including dimensional modeling, canonical datasets, and trusted, shared business metrics.
• Drive high-impact data initiatives such as platform migrations, new product analytics, data integrations, and reliability improvements.
• Establish operational excellence through SLAs and SLOs, data quality standards, testing, and robust observability across pipelines and data products.
• Lead, develop, and partner by coaching data engineers, collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Analytics, Data Science, and Security, and championing data governance and self-service.

What you're great at:

• 12+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering, with a clear progression into senior technical and people leadership roles.
• 4+ years leading and scaling data engineering organizations, including managing managers and senior engineers across multiple teams.
• Deep experience with at least one modern cloud data stack, including cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure; data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift; orchestration tools such as Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect; and transformation frameworks like dbt or equivalents. 
• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language commonly used in data engineering, such as Python, Scala, or Java. Demonstrated success designing and operating large-scale data pipelines, batch and or streaming, with strong reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Demonstrated success delivering reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient data platforms and pipelines, both batch and streaming.
• Experience partnering closely with Product, Analytics, Data Science, and business leaders to translate strategy into data platform priorities.
• Proven ability to set technical direction, make cross-team tradeoffs, and drive alignment across complex organizations.
• Strong executive communication skills and experience operating in regulated environments with an understanding of governance, privacy, and compliance needs.

How You’ll be Rewarded:

At CLEAR, we help YOU move forward - because when you’re at your best, we’re at our best. You’ll work with talented team members motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier. Our offices are bright and energetic with an open concept and plenty of conference rooms and casual co-working spaces. We also offer catered lunches every day and have fully stocked kitchens. Outside of the office, we invest in your well-being and learning & development with stipends and reimbursement programs.

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family-building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, annual wellness stipend, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, a CLEAR Plus membership, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match. The base salary range for this role is $225,000-$275,000, depending on levels of skills and experience.

The base salary range represents the low and high end of CLEAR’s salary range for this position. Salaries will vary depending on various factors which include, but are not limited to location, education, skills, experience and performance. The range listed is just one component of CLEAR’s total compensation package for employees and other rewards may include annual bonuses, commission, Restricted Stock Units.

CLEAR provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities or protected needs. Please let us know if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include, but are not limited to, time off, extra breaks, making a change to the application process or work procedures, policy exceptions, providing documents in an alternative format, live captioning or using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

We are committed to a transparent and secure hiring process. All communications related to this role will come directly from a CLEAR employee through valid CLEAR channels (e.g., a valid @clearme.com email address or verified CLEAR LinkedIn profile). We encourage candidates to remain alert to job scams and to report any suspicious activity.

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