Vice President of Data

Role Description

ButterflyMX is looking for a world-class Vice President of Data to lead a company-wide data transformation and establish data as one of our most important operating advantages.

The VP of Data will establish Snowflake and the governed data layer as the company’s source of truth. Every important business entity will have a trusted golden record. Every critical metric will have one definition, one owner, and one official home. Executives, operators, dashboards, workflows, and AI agents will use the same authoritative data products.

This leader will enable every function to understand performance, diagnose problems, identify opportunities, and make confident decisions faster. They will not measure success by the number of dashboards produced but by the quality and speed of decisions, the adoption and trust of data products, and the degree to which data multiplies the effectiveness of our people.

This is a highly visible leadership role reporting directly to the CTO, with four initial direct reports and broad influence across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Finance, Operations, and Executive Leadership.

The role requires an unusual combination of diplomacy and conviction. The VP of Data must build strong partnerships across the company, understand the legitimate needs of each function, and navigate disagreement without becoming aligned to any single political constituency. At the same time, this person must be willing to challenge leaders, reject weak definitions, expose inconvenient truths, and push persistently for the changes required to establish trusted and durable systems.

We are not looking for a conventional reporting leader, an enterprise data bureaucrat, or someone who operates only at the strategy level. We need a hands-on executive who has built at our scale before, can challenge architecture decisions, understands the business deeply, and remains close enough to the work to inspect models, write code, prototype agents, and help solve difficult problems personally.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute ButterflyMX’s enterprise data strategy.
• Prioritize transformation work based on commercial impact, decision value, risk, and organizational leverage.
• Balance foundational investments with rapid delivery of visible business value.
• Establish the governed data layer, primarily centered on Snowflake, as ButterflyMX’s authoritative source of truth.
• Ensure leaders can clearly understand performance, diagnose problems, identify root causes, and act confidently.
• Translate business questions into durable analytical systems rather than one-time analyses.
• Partner with Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Operations to define the economic and operational relationships that drive company performance.
• Identify leading indicators and causal relationships, not merely lagging reports.
• Create mechanisms that reveal emerging risks and opportunities before they become obvious in monthly or quarterly reporting.
• Improve planning, forecasting, resource allocation, prioritization, and accountability throughout the organization.
• Establish a company-wide metric governance framework.
• Treat data products with the same rigor applied to strong external software products.
• Define users, use cases, adoption goals, trust requirements, service levels, documentation, and success measures for each important data product.
• Design data experiences that are intuitive, discoverable, and easier to use than informal alternatives.
• Measure adoption, usability, reliability, consumer satisfaction, and decisions influenced.
• Build a data organization in which AI agents are a primary working tool, not an experiment or side project.
• Remain technically engaged enough to review code, inspect models, prototype solutions, and participate directly when difficult problems require senior judgment.
• Engineer data quality into the platform rather than relying on manual review and reconciliation.
• Centralize standards, architecture, governance, and core data products while decentralizing responsible usage.
• Develop strong partnerships with every major business function.
• Lead, develop, and expand a high-performing data organization, beginning with four initial reports.

Qualifications

• Visionary and Transformational
• Commercially Fluent
• Technically Credible
• Operationally Grounded
• Agent-Fluent
• Product-Minded
• Politically Mature
• Truth-Seeking and Principled
• Headstrong and Collaborative

Requirements

• 12+ years of progressive experience across data engineering, analytics engineering, business intelligence, data architecture, data products, or related disciplines.
• 5+ years leading professional data teams, including experience managing managers or senior technical leaders.
• Demonstrated success building or transforming a data function within a growing SaaS or technology company of comparable scale.
• Deep experience with modern cloud data platforms, preferably including Snowflake.
• Strong experience with data transformation and modeling frameworks such as dbt.
• Experience with managed ingestion platforms such as Fivetran and with designing reliable source-to-warehouse pipelines.
• Strong experience with business intelligence and self-service analytics platforms such as Sigma.
• Deep understanding of dimensional modeling, semantic layers, entity resolution, master data, golden records, data contracts, lineage, observability, and quality engineering.
• Experience integrating and governing data from Salesforce and other core SaaS business systems.
• Demonstrated ability to establish governed business metrics and resolve cross-functional definition disputes.
• Strong commercial understanding of recurring-revenue business models and SaaS operating metrics.
• Experience designing data products for executive, operational, analytical, and machine consumers.
• Experience supporting planning, forecasting, customer lifecycle analysis, go-to-market analytics, financial reporting, and product analytics.
• Personally built and shipped at least one production AI agent or agentic workflow.
• Strong understanding of AI-agent evaluation, tool access, context management, observability, permissions, security, and operational reliability.
• Hands-on technical capability to write and review SQL, inspect dbt projects, evaluate models, troubleshoot pipelines, and prototype solutions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior executives and drive difficult cross-functional changes.
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in a relevant technical, quantitative, or business field is welcome but not required. Exceptional experience, judgment, and results matter more than credentials.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental and Vision plans (ButterflyMX covers 80% of the cost) starting day 1
• 401(k) plan with a match
• 10 paid holidays, 20 vacation days, 5 sick days, 3 floating holidays
• Basic Life and Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance (ButterflyMX covers 100% of the cost)
• Short and Long Term Disability (ButterflyMX covers 100% of the cost)
• Paid Family Leave
• Employee Assistance Program
• Quarterly self-care stipends
• Access to optional benefits including pre-tax flexible healthcare spending accounts (FSA and HSA), Dependent Care FSA, and Commuter Benefits, as well as optional Supplemental Life, AD&D, Hospital Indemnity, Legal, Accident, Critical Illness, Pet, and Personal Liability Insurance
• And more!