Director Data Management & Data Platforms (Richmond)

DIRECTOR, DATA MANAGEMENT & DATA PLATFORMS

WHO WE ARE

Everforth Apex Systems is a leading global technology and digital engineering firm dedicated to helping organizations adapt, innovate, and thrive in a world of constant change. Leveraging deep industry insights and proven expertise, we deliver end-to-end solutions that accelerate time-to-value and realize our clients’ digital visions across commercial and federal sectors.

Our comprehensive solution portfolio spans AI & data, cloud and infrastructure, digital engineering, customer experience, cybersecurity, enterprise platforms, application development, strategy, transformation, and managed services. Powered by proprietary assets, accelerators, and strong alliances with cutting-edge technology partners—including Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, and more—we turn complexity into progress and measurable business outcomes.

With a presence in over 70 markets across North America, Europe, and India, Everforth Apex Systems innovates alongside our customers, building and deploying tailored artificial intelligence solutions to enhance business value and improve customer experiences. As part of the commercial segment of Everforth, we are committed to driving the next wave of global IT services and digital transformation.

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Director, Data Management & Data Platforms owns the full breadth of IT data management at Apex: the established enterprise data environment (SQL Server, Oracle, Azure SQL, SSIS/ETL, middleware and reporting), the Databricks lakehouse that is emerging as our central data product, and the team that operates our Data360 master data management product. The Director is accountable for the health, security, quality, cost and scalability of every data platform in the portfolio, and for setting the multi-year data platform strategy, including evaluation of Snowflake and other technologies for potential future adoption.

This is a hands-on leadership role. The Director leads a team consisting primarily of offshore vendor resources — currently led day-to-day by manager-level personnel employed by the vendor — and senior engineers, partners with Security, Enterprise Architecture, Application and Business Intelligence teams, and represents the data platform roadmap to senior IT and business leadership. Deep, practical Databricks expertise is the primary technical requirement; the ability to apply consistent disciplines of governance, quality, architecture, operations, DevOps, cost management and scalability across all platforms is the primary leadership requirement.

Key Responsibilities

• Data Platform Strategy & Roadmap
• Define and maintain the enterprise data platform strategy and 1–3 year roadmap covering the existing SQL Server/Oracle/Azure SQL estate, Databricks, Data360 and future platforms.
• Lead the evaluation of Snowflake and other emerging platforms: build the business case, define selection criteria, run proofs of concept, and recommend adopt / defer / decline decisions to IT leadership.
• Set platform standards that determine which workloads belong on which platform, and steer the rationalization of legacy components as workloads migrate.
• Align data roadmaps with senior management, application owners and BI stakeholders; communicate priorities, trade-offs and progress to executive audiences.
• Databricks Lakehouse (core platform)
• Own the Databricks environment end to end: workspace and Unity Catalog design, compute policies, Delta Lake standards, medallion (bronze/silver/gold) architecture, ingestion patterns and serving layers.
• Establish the engineering standards for pipelines (Delta Live Tables / Lakeflow, Workflows, notebooks, SQL warehouses) and drive adoption of Databricks as the central data product for analytics, integration and downstream applications.
• Oversee identity, access and lineage through Unity Catalog and Azure Entra ID integration; enforce least-privilege access to data assets.
• Manage Databricks platform operations: monitoring, job reliability, incident response, upgrades, capacity and DBU/cloud cost optimization.
• Data360 Master Data Management
• Provide leadership and oversight to the team running the Data360 MDM product, including product roadmap, release management, vendor relationship and service levels.
• Ensure golden-record definitions, match/merge rules, stewardship workflows and reference data standards are maintained and aligned with the enterprise data model.
• Integrate Data360 mastered data with Databricks, the enterprise warehouse and consuming applications so that mastered data is the single trusted source across platforms.
• Enterprise Data Environment (existing estate)
• Own and manage production and non-production data domains: PeopleSoft data integration, middleware, ETL (SSIS), nightly jobs and reporting components in each region.
• Understand the purpose and owning teams of every non-production region; ensure environments are properly configured, provisioned and refreshed; negotiate region usage with application teams.
• Accountable for installation, configuration, patching, monitoring and maintenance of all data management applications; troubleshoot application and ETL issues affecting the flow of data transactions.
• Work with the Data Architect and ETL development team to resolve production issues requiring development; champion upgrade recommendations.
• Enable data consumption through APIs and governed data products; provide business-facing communication for enterprise-level issues.
• Cross-Platform Disciplines (applied to SQL Server, Oracle, Azure SQL, Databricks, Data360 and any future platform)
• Governance & Security: Define and enforce data classification, access control, encryption, masking and retention standards. Audit database and platform access across dev, test, UAT and prod. Partner with the Security Team and maintain evidence for SOX and certification audits.
• Data Quality: Establish data quality frameworks, rules, monitoring and stewardship processes; publish quality metrics; lead root-cause and remediation efforts across source systems, MDM and the lakehouse.
• Architecture: Own the enterprise data architecture, data models, integration patterns and platform reference architectures; ensure new solutions conform to standards and legacy solutions have a defined path forward.
• Operational Excellence: Define SLAs/SLOs, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident and problem management, disaster recovery and change control for all data platforms; drive continuous improvement in reliability.
• DevOps & Automation: Mature CI/CD for data assets using Azure DevOps (repositories, pipelines, boards), infrastructure as code, automated testing and environment promotion for databases, ETL and Databricks assets.
• Cost Management: Own the data platform budget; forecast, monitor and optimize cloud consumption, licensing and vendor spend; implement chargeback/showback visibility and FinOps practices.
• Annual Budget Planning: Lead the annual budgeting process for data platform consumption costs (Databricks DBU/compute, cloud storage, licensing and vendor spend); build forecasts against usage trends and growth plans, and track actuals against budget throughout the year.
• Scalability & Performance: Ensure platforms scale with business growth and data volume; lead capacity planning, performance tuning and workload placement decisions.
• People & Vendor Leadership
• Lead, coach and develop a team consisting primarily of offshore vendor resources — database administrators, data engineers and MDM specialists, led day-to-day by manager-level personnel employed by the vendor; set goals, build skills (particularly Databricks) and plan succession.
• Vet, select and manage vendors and managed-service partners; negotiate contracts and hold partners to service commitments.
• Manage multiple customers, suppliers and priorities in a rapidly changing environment.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university with a major in Computer Science, Information Systems or related field; Master's degree preferred.
• Databricks certification (e.g., Data Engineer Professional or Platform Administrator) strongly preferred.
• 12+ years of progressive data management experience, including 7+ years managing teams and 3+ years leading managers or a multi-team function.
• 3+ years of hands-on and leadership experience with Databricks in a production enterprise environment (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Workflows, SQL warehouses, cost governance). This is the key technical requirement for the role.
• Demonstrated experience applying governance/security, data quality, architecture, operational excellence, DevOps, cost management and scalability practices consistently across multiple data platforms.
• Experience with Master Data Management concepts and platforms; Precisely Data360 (or comparable MDM such as Informatica, Reltio or Profisee) preferred.
• Experience with data lake / lakehouse and cloud data warehouse concepts; familiarity with Snowflake sufficient to lead a platform evaluation.
• Experience leading the operations of mission-critical systems and services globally, and supporting remote offices in a large-scale data environment.
• Experience managing data from a mix of on-premises, IaaS/S]]>