Director of Data Platform Engineering (26-27)

Director of Data Platform Engineering

 This is a vacancy for the 26-27 school year with a target start date of July 1, 2026

 

Mission:

The Director of Data Platform Engineering leads the team responsible for building, operating, and optimizing IDEA's data infrastructure. This leader ensures the data platform is reliable, scalable, secure, and performant—enabling Analytics Engineering, Data Science, Business Intelligence, and Research teams to deliver insights that improve student outcomes across IDEA Public Schools.

Reporting to the Managing Director of Data Platform & Engineering, this role translates architectural vision into operational reality through disciplined engineering execution, automation-first practices, and a relentless focus on platform reliability. This leader manages the platform engineering team through IDEA's critical transition from legacy ETL systems to a modern Snowflake-based data lakehouse, balancing the urgency of modernization with the stability requirements of production operations.

This role is central to achieving IDEA's goal of reducing data source onboarding from years to days through automated ingestion, robust orchestration, and comprehensive DataOps practices.
 

Supervisory Responsibilities:

Directly manages Data Platform Engineers - Build and maintain cloud data infrastructure, Snowflake environments, and ingestion pipelines

Location:

This is a full-time position based in Texas, with preference given to candidates who live in Austin, El Paso, Houston, Permian Basin (Midland/Odessa), Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, and Tarrant County (Fort Worth), or who are willing to relocate.

 

Travel Expectations:    

10% travel for team collaboration, critical implementations, and leadership meetings. May include occasional visits to IDEA campuses and headquarters.

 

What You’ll Do – Accountabilities

Essential Duties:

·          Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing platform engineering team of 4 direct reports with diverse skill sets (infrastructure, automation, legacy systems)

·          Lead day-to-day build out and operation of IDEA's Snowflake-based data platform ensuring production-grade reliability, security, and performance

·          Oversee Snowflake environment management including warehouse sizing, resource monitors, cost optimization, role-based access control, and performance tuning

·          Ensure platform infrastructure meets defined SLAs for data freshness, pipeline reliability, and system availability

·          Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes that surface issues early and drive durable fixes

·          Partner with IT Security and Data Governance to ensure platform meets enterprise standards for access controls, audit trails, and compliance

·          Oversee implementation and operation of automated ELT pipelines from 20-30+ source systems (PowerSchool, assessment platforms, SIS systems, financial systems) into Snowflake

 

Additional Duties and Responsibilities:

·          Ensure ingestion pipelines meet standards for reliability, data freshness, schema evolution handling, and error recovery

·          Lead evaluation and operational management of ingestion tools (Fivetran, Airbyte) ensuring consistent implementation patterns

·          Partner with Analytics Engineering to ensure Bronze layer (raw data landing) supports downstream transformation needs without creating coupling

·          Drive "onboarding in days not years" goal through templated ingestion patterns, automated connector setup, and self-service enablement

·          Monitor data pipeline health through observability dashboards and proactive alerting

·          Partner with DataOps Engineer to embed CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment automation across all platform work

·          Ensure infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform) for all Snowflake resources, reducing manual configuration and enabling reproducibility

·          Implement deployment standards including version control (Git), code review, automated testing, and rollback procedures

·          Drive platform reliability through SLO/SLA definition, error budgets, and post-incident reviews that prevent recurrence

·          Establish observability practices ensuring visibility into pipeline performance, data quality, costs, and system health

·          Balance reliability work (automation, monitoring, technical debt) with delivery commitments (new data sources, platform features)

·          Serve as primary technical partner to Manager of Analytics Engineering, ensuring platform capabilities support dbt development, testing, and data product delivery

·          Work closely with Data Platform Architect to implement architectural standards faithfully while surfacing execution challenges and operational realities that should inform future design

·          Collaborate with Director of Data Governance to ensure platform enforces data quality rules, access policies, and metadata standards

·          Partner with Director of Business Intelligence and MD of Data Science & Analytics to understand platform requirements for dashboards and advanced analytics

·          Interface with IT infrastructure team on networking, security, gateway management, and on-prem and/or cloud service integration

·          Provide light oversight to Data Warehouse Manager maintaining production stability of legacy SSIS/SQL Server systems during 18-month modernization period

·          Establish clear boundaries preventing legacy work from consuming modern team capacity

·          Set aggressive migration timelines with executive alignment

·          Triage legacy incidents, prioritizing only business-critical issues while deferring optimization and enhancements

·          Protect modern team focus: legacy maintenance is separate from modern platform development

·          Develop quarterly platform engineering roadmap balancing new capabilities, reliability improvements, and technical debt reduction

·          Translate business requirements into platform capabilities, data source priorities, and infrastructure investments

 

·          Provide input to Data Platform Architect on architectural decisions based on operational experience and execution constraints

·          Participate in tool evaluations (ingestion, orchestration, observability) with hands-on proof-of-concept work

·          Provide clear, timely communication about platform health, incidents, risks, and planned improvements to MD, peer managers, and stakeholder

·          Translate technical platform issues into operational and business impact for non-technical audience

·          Run regular platform demos showcasing new capabilities, performance improvements, and reliability wins

·          Establish trust through transparency about what's working, what's not, and what's being done to improve

·          Support operational management of Snowflake, Fivetran/Airbyte, and orchestration platforms

·          Ensure tools are implemented using consistent patterns with clear ownership and documentation

·          Identify sources of operational friction, manual toil, and platform fragility through metrics and team feedback

 

Knowledge and Skills – Competencies

• Make Strategic Decisions: This team member fosters an inclusive decision-making environment by encouraging diverse perspectives, managing disagreements constructively, and creating space for all voices to be heard. They clearly communicate final decisions, providing context and anticipated impact—even when choices are difficult or unpopular.

• Manage Work and Teams: This team member builds and maintains systems to track progress toward team goals, ensuring clarity through defined roles and responsibilities. They implement structured processes that support smooth team operations and strategically allocate time and resources to drive goal achievement.

• Grow Self and Others: This team member uses data to assess development needs and designs learning opportunities that align with team goals and individual career growth. They model a growth mindset by being open about their own development and ensure that both personal and team-led learning initiatives are impactful and well-aligned with organizational priorities.

• Build a Culture of Trust:  This team member fosters a team culture where individuals genuinely care for one another both personally and professionally. They lead with transparency, encourage open communication, including healthy conflict—and promote reliability and consistency, while regularly seeking and responding to team feedback to enhance the collective experience.

• Communicate Deliberately: This team member leads inclusive discussions that surface obstacles and drive actionable solutions, ensuring all voices are heard. They communicate key information clearly across multiple channels and establish feedback loops that promote open dialogue, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

 

Additional Skills:

Cloud Data Platform Expertise:

·          Deep hands-on experience with Snowflake including warehouse management, resource monitors, clustering, caching, performance optimization, and cost management

·          Strong understanding of cloud data architectures (data lakes, data warehouses, lakehouse patterns)

·          Familiarity with Iceberg/Delta table formats and modern lakehouse capabilities

·          Experience with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) including IAM, networking, storage, and service integration

·          Knowledge of data security concepts (encryption, role-based access control, PII handling, audit trails)

 

Data Engineering & Ingestion:

·          Proficiency with modern ELT tools (Fivetran, Airbyte, Stitch) and understanding of when to use pre-built connectors vs. custom solutions

·          Advanced SQL skills for troubleshooting pipelines, validating data, and performance optimization

·          Working knowledge of Python for automation, scripting, and data manipulation

·          Experience with orchestration platforms (Dagster, Prefect, Airflow) for workflow management

·          Understanding of data modeling concepts (star schema, wide tables, slowly changing dimensions) to support Analytics Engineering


 

DataOps & Platform Reliability:

·          Strong familiarity with CI/CD concepts, Git workflows, and code review practices

·          Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for reproducible infrastructure

·          Understanding of observability principles (metrics, logging, tracing) and tools (Datadog, Monte Carlo, Elementary)

·          Knowledge of incident management, post-mortems, and SRE practices (SLOs, error budgets, on-call)

·          Ability to balance feature delivery with reliability, technical debt, and automation work

 

Leadership & Soft Skills:

·          Proven ability to build and lead technical teams through periods of significant change and modernization

·          Strong prioritization and time management skills managing competing urgent demands

·          Excellent facilitation skills for technical design discussions, incident response, and retrospectives

·          Change management experience helping teams adopt new tools, practices, and ways of working

Required experience:

·          Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, OR equivalent practical experience

·          Experience: Minimum 7 years in data engineering, platform engineering, data infrastructure, or related technical roles

·          Leadership experience: At least 3 years in technical leadership or people management role leading data/platform engineering teams

·          Cloud platform experience: Demonstrated hands-on experience building and operating cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or similar) in production environments

·          Modernization experience: Proven track record migrating from legacy ETL systems to modern cloud-native ELT platforms

·          Team development: Experience hiring, mentoring, and developing data engineers from junior to senior levels
 

Preferred Education and Experience:

·          Advanced degree: Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related technical field

·          Snowflake expertise: SnowPro Core or Advanced certification, or deep hands-on Snowflake experience

·          Multi-domain environments: Experience building platforms supporting multiple business units, states, or regions with federated operations

·          Education sector: Experience with K-12 education data systems (student information systems, assessment platforms, education data standards)

·          DataOps/SRE background: Formal training or deep experience in site reliability engineering, platform reliability, or DataOps practices

·          Open source contributions: Active participation in data engineering communities, conference presentations, or technical blog posts demonstrating thought leadership

Physical Requirements:

·          Prolonged periods working on a computer and in virtual meetings

·          Ability to travel domestically via car and air travel

·          Flexibility for occasional evening/weekend work during critical deployments or incident response

 

What We Offer:

 

Compensation & Benefits:

Salaries for people entering this role typically fall between $119,000 and $142,800, commensurate with relevant experience and qualifications and in alignment with internal equity. This role is also eligible for performance pay based on organizational performance and goal attainment.

 

 

Additionally, we offer medical, dental, and vision plans, disability, life insurance, parenting benefits, flexible spending account options, generous vacation time, referral bonuses, professional development, and a 403(b) plan. You can find more information about our benefits at https://ideapublicschools.org/careers/benefits/.

 

* IDEA may offer a relocation stipend to defray the cost of moving for this role, if applicable.

 

 

Application process:

Submit your application online through Jobvite. Please note that applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. Applicants are encouraged to apply as early as possible.

 

 

Learn more about IDEA

At IDEA the Staff Experience Team uses our Core Values to promote human connection and a culture of integrity, respect, and belonging for all Team and Family members.  Learn more about our Commitment to Core Values here: https://ideapublicschools.org/our-story/#core-values