Senior Vice President, Data Operations

Senior Vice President, Data Operations

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid 3x a week in office, remote up to 2 days per week).

Overview

We are seeking a Senior Vice President of Data Operations to lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of our enterprise‑wide data infrastructure at petabyte scale. The role owns the full data stack, from ingestion pipelines to real‑time streaming, ML/AI capabilities, and governance frameworks to ensure data is trusted, accessible, and compliant.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a long‑term data platform strategy aligned with company goals.
• Advise the CTO and C‑suite on data architecture, investments, and organizational structure.
• Translate data capabilities into clear business value for non‑technical stakeholders.
• Establish a data‑first culture, promoting data literacy and responsible use.
• Lead platform architecture across batch and real‑time ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers.
• Drive evolution of data warehouse/lakehouse strategy (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, DBT) for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Lead adoption of emerging data and AI technologies; design for technical and self‑serve users.
• Own data pipeline architecture for streaming (Kafka, Pub/Sub) and batch frameworks, ensuring low‑latency delivery.
• Establish enterprise data governance: ownership, lineage, cataloging, quality SLAs, privacy & compliance frameworks.
• Build a trusted data foundation, ensuring an authoritative source of truth for downstream teams.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a high‑performing data organization across Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Analytics Engineering.
• Recruit and develop senior technical talent; create a team culture of ownership, craftsmanship, and continuous learning.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Data Science leaders to align roadmaps with business priorities.
• Drive data infrastructure readiness for generative AI and ML (model training pipelines, embedding stores, experiment tracking).
• Collaborate with Product and Editorial teams to identify AI opportunities with measurable impact.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related quantitative field (Master’s or PhD a plus).
• 15+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or analytics infrastructure.
• 5+ years in a senior leadership role.
• Proven track record designing and scaling petabyte‑level data platforms in high‑traffic, data‑intensive industry (media, e‑commerce, fintech).
• Deep expertise in modern data stack: data lake/lakehouse, cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Dataflow), orchestration (Airflow, Dagster).
• Strong command of GCP, AWS and experience managing large‑scale distributed systems at production quality.
• Experience establishing data governance, metadata management, and data quality frameworks at enterprise scale.
• Strategic mindset: ability to define a 3‑year roadmap and make pragmatic architectural trade‑offs.
• Exceptional communication and executive presence, with fluency speaking to engineers and senior management.
• Strong preference for experience in digital media, content platforms or advertising technology.

Benefits

• Salary range: $315,000 – $375,000 (New York).
• Annual bonuses and long‑term incentives.
• Medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage.
• Unlimited paid time off, 10‑12 paid holidays, generous paid parental leave.
• 401(k) with company match, life insurance, accident insurance, pet insurance, voluntary benefits.
• Comprehensive benefits such as tuition reimbursement, commuter benefits, family care benefits.

EEO Statement

People Inc. provides equal employment opportunity to all persons regardless of protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified individuals with disabilities. The Company participates in the federal E‑Verify program.