Director of Analytics

Role Description

Direct Travel is in the midst of a defining data transformation, and this role sits at the center of it. We are seeking a Director of Analytics — a hands-on technical leader who will own the strategic direction, architecture, and delivery of our global analytics platform. This platform serves both internal stakeholders and thousands of clients worldwide, making it one of the most visible and impactful investments the company is making.

This is not a role for someone who manages from a distance. We need a leader who has personally built and shipped data products — someone who has architected pipelines, modeled semantic layers, stood up embedded analytics applications, and knows what it takes to deliver production-grade analytics at scale. You will lead a team of analytics engineers who work across the full data lifecycle: from raw data ingestion and warehouse architecture to semantic modeling, self-service reporting, and bespoke client-facing data products.

The right candidate has a demonstrable track record of delivering both internal and externally facing analytics products, understands the engineering rigor required to operate a multi-tenant analytics platform, and can recruit, mentor, and elevate a high-caliber team while continuing to provide deep technical guidance.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.
• 5+ years in a leadership role directly managing and growing analytics or data engineering teams.
• Proven track record of personally delivering production analytics products — both internally facing (executive dashboards, operational reporting, self-service BI) and externally facing (client-facing embedded analytics, multi-tenant reporting platforms, bespoke data products).
• Demonstrated experience recruiting, hiring, and developing analytics engineering talent across multiple levels of seniority.

Requirements

• Deep expertise with cloud data warehouses, specifically Snowflake.
• Working experience with one or more of: Azure DataLake / Synapse, BigQuery, Redshift.
• Strong fluency across at least two major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their respective data services (S3, Glue, Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP Cloud Functions, Dataflow, Pub/Sub).
• Extensive hands-on experience with Looker and LookML modeling.
• Senior-level proficiency with Looker or an equivalent (Tableau, Power BI) for advanced reporting, visualization, and stakeholder-facing analytics.
• Expert-level SQL skills across multiple dialects (Snowflake SQL, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, etc.), including complex query authoring, performance diagnostics, and optimization.
• Hands-on experience with dbt (Core or Cloud) for transformation orchestration, testing, and documentation.
• Strong proficiency in Python for data processing, automation, pipeline development, and scripting.
• Experience implementing data governance frameworks: RBAC, column-level security, data masking, lineage tracking, and compliance controls.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills.

Benefits

• Shape the technical architecture from the ground up.
• Recruit and nurture a world-class team of analytics professionals.
• Define what “best-in-class” analytics looks like for a global travel company.
• Deliver data products that thousands of clients interact with daily.