Data Lead - Enterprise Data Migration

Data Lead Enterprise Data Migration

Experience: 12+ Years
Location: San Diego, CA/ Charlotte, NC
Job Type: Contract

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Data Lead to own and drive the end-to-end data workstream for a large-scale financial services platform migration program . The ideal candidate will bring strong expertise in enterprise data migration, reconciliation, data quality, testing, cutover planning, and stakeholder management.

This is a senior, client-facing leadership role requiring close collaboration with Data Engineering, Application Development, QE, Architecture, Product, and Business teams to ensure successful and controlled migration execution.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end data migration strategy, planning, and execution across source and target platforms.

• Define migration sequencing, source-to-target mapping, transformation rules, dependencies, cutover, rollback, and recovery strategies.

• Establish data validation, reconciliation, and data quality frameworks to ensure migration accuracy and completeness.

• Partner with QE teams to define migration testing strategies and support SIT, UAT, defect triage, and production validation .

• Lead production migration planning, cutover readiness, deployment activities, and post-production hypercare.

• Drive migration governance, risk management, issue resolution, and stakeholder sign-offs.

• Lead client workshops and communicate migration strategy, status, risks, dependencies, and key decisions to senior stakeholders.

• Coordinate across Data Engineering, Application, QE, Architecture, Product, and Business teams.

• Lead and provide direction to onsite/offshore data teams and migration SMEs.

• Ensure migration activities align with application releases, environment readiness, and overall program milestones.

Required Skills & Experience

• 12+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Management, Data Integration, or Data Migration.

• 5+ years of experience leading enterprise-scale data migration initiatives.

• Strong experience with data migration strategy, source-to-target mapping, transformation, conversion, and reconciliation .

• Strong understanding of Data Warehousing, ETL, SQL, Data Quality, and Data Governance .

• Hands-on experience defining data reconciliation and validation frameworks .

• Experience with migration testing, SIT/UAT, production cutover, rollback, and hypercare .

• Experience with cloud data platforms; AWS experience is preferred .

• Strong client-facing and executive stakeholder management experience.

• Experience leading cross-functional and onsite/offshore teams.

• Strong communication, workshop facilitation, risk management, and program governance skills.

Preferred Experience

• Experience within Wealth Management, Brokerage, Banking, Insurance, or broader Financial Services .

• Experience migrating customer, account, advisor, policy, transaction, or financial data .

• Experience with large-scale platform modernization or legacy-to-cloud migration programs.

• Understanding of feature-flag-enabled migration approaches.

• Exposure to automated migration testing, reconciliation frameworks, or AI-assisted testing is an advantage.