Director of Data & Analytics

POSITION PURPOSE AND SUMMARY

The Director, Data and Analytics, is accountable for the delivery and ongoing operation of ESA's enterprise data platform. The role converts an approved platform roadmap into working, supported production capabilities, including ingestion from source systems, curated and modeled data across medallion layers, governed access, and the analytics assets the business runs on. Accountability does not end at go-live. This leader owns the platform in production, including its reliability, cost, data quality, and the technical debt the team creates.

The team is small and senior by design. The Director leads a Senior Data Engineer and a Technical Lead who coordinates offshore engineering and works day-to-day with implementation partner and offshore engineers. Leverage in this role comes from engineering judgment and delivery discipline rather than headcount. The expectation is that this leader is in the detail with the team, participating in design reviews, release readiness activities, and root cause analysis, rather than collecting status and passing it upward.

The technical environment is a Databricks Lakehouse on AWS, with Lakeflow declarative pipelines, medallion layering, Kimball dimensional and data vault modeling, Unity Catalog governance, and Tableau for business intelligence. A legacy Snowflake environment supports private equity sponsor reporting and is under evaluation for consolidation. A multi-year platform program is underway, integrating ADP, central reservation system APIs, S3 file delivery, business-maintained spreadsheet feeds, and master data.

ESA is actively applying artificial intelligence to how the data team works and to how the business reaches data. Current and near-term work includes AI-assisted engineering and code review, agentic development patterns, automated data quality detection, and natural language access to governed data through Databricks Genie. This is offered as something th