Director, Data Platforms

Highlights for Children•Columbus, OH

11h

About The Position

Highlights for Children is advancing a major digital and data transformation to enhance customer engagement, inspire innovation, and accelerate decision-making across the enterprise removing our dependency on the highly customized current system. The Director of Data Platforms will be the strategic and technical leader responsible for evolving our enterprise data platform into a modern, scalable, AI-ready ecosystem built on Microsoft Fabric and Azure. They will be accountable for delivering platform capabilities on time, on target, and on budget, establishing a culture of execution excellence and measurable outcomes. Reporting to the SVP of IT, the Director of Data Platforms will guide a multidisciplinary team of engineers and architects, from the internal team and vendor partners. They will operate the data platform as a product, delivering reliable, governed, high-quality data capabilities that empower business teams, enable personalization and analytics, support digital product experiences, and unlock new value for the organization. This role blends strategic partnership with hands-on expertise. We’re looking for a hands-on leader who will work closely with stakeholders driving phased migrations with parallel legacy run, rigorous testing, and zero-disruption standards. They will shape platform direction, drive engineering excellence, steward governance practices, and champion a modern data culture across Highlights.

Requirements

Proven experience modernizing enterprise data platforms using Microsoft Fabric and Azure cloud services.
Strong data architecture background with expertise across data modeling, platform patterns, governance tooling, and large-scale data systems.
Hands-on experience with ELT/ETL pipelines, orchestration, event-driven architectures, APIs, and real-time data flows.
Experience enabling ML engineering and data science teams through platform capabilities such as feature stores, model pipelines, and AI-ready data patterns.
Deep understanding of data governance frameworks, metadata management, data quality automation, and responsible data practices.
Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and reliability practices for data platforms.
Track record of owning platform security posture, including proactive risk identification, mitigation planning, incident response readiness, and security-by-design practices in partnership with Information Security.
Demonstrated ability to integrate identity, lineage, and metadata to support unified buyer/user/household data and personalized multi-channel customer experiences.
Demonstrated success leading data engineering or data platform teams in a modernizing IT environment.
Ability to connect technical platform decisions to business outcomes and KPIs.
Strong communication, storytelling, and influence skills—comfortable engaging with both executives and technical teams.
Experience managing vendors, leveraging your professional network, evaluating emerging technologies, and optimizing platform spend and performance.
Ability to activate external networks: industry experts, vendors, peer communities—to accelerate learning curves and enhance platform quality.

Nice To Haves

Consumer, subscription-based, publishing, or digital product environments.
Background in customer engagement, personalization, or content-driven data use cases.

Responsibilities

Co-develop and execute the enterprise data platform strategy in partnership with the SVP of IT and cross-functional business leaders.
Operate the data platform with a product mindset, owning the platform roadmap, backlog, release plans, and service quality.
Align platform capabilities with business priorities, enabling measurable impact tied to customer engagement, revenue opportunities, cost optimization, and innovation.
Champion responsible and ethical data use, ensuring the platform supports privacy, compliance, and trustworthy AI outcomes.
Ensure platform design supports Highlights’ unified customer and household data needs, including cross-product identity resolution, metadata-rich lineage, and trustworthy personalization across channels.
Lead the modernization and continuous enhancement of Highlights’ enterprise data platform using Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and modern engineering patterns.
Oversee platform services that support scalable ELT/ETL pipelines, orchestration frameworks, real-time/event-driven data flows, semantic modeling, and reusable data products.
Architect and deliver platform features that support AI/ML workloads, including model pipelines, feature stores, vectorized data storage, and AI-ready data access patterns.
Drive reliability, observability, data quality, performance, and SLAs through modern DataOps and Site Reliability Engineering practices.
Lead risk-assessed, zero-data-loss migrations from legacy systems using automated testing, dual-run validation, and lineage auditability ensuring uninterrupted operations for our subscription, eCommerce, and multi-channel customer experiences.
Oversee the integration and unification of multi-source customer/household data (buyer, parent, child, educator) to support cross-channel engagement, subscription optimization, and personalization.
Advance enterprise data governance by integrating stewardship, ownership, metadata, and data quality controls directly into platform capabilities.
Implement automated governance and quality tooling—metadata services, lineage, cataloging, profiling, quality checks to create trustworthy, certified data products.
Ensure metadata, lineage, and household-level identity are embedded into the platform to support trustworthy decision-making and personalized customer experiences across Highlights’ brands.
Be a strategic partner with Product, Marketing, Operations, Analytics, Finance, and Enterprise Applications to translate business needs into platform capabilities.
Work closely with the Director of Analytics to ensure seamless integration between the data platform and analytics/reporting ecosystems.
Communicate platform direction, progress, risks, and value clearly to executive stakeholders—translating complex technical concepts into business outcomes.
Build and leverage a strong internal and external professional network—including vendor partners, industry practitioners, and Microsoft ecosystem peers—to accelerate problem-solving and strengthen platform maturity.
Lead, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary data platform team including data engineers, platform engineers, and data architects.
Provide hiring authority and budget ownership to shape a high-performing, scalable team aligned with transformation goals.
Serve as a change agent, fostering a data-driven mindset, challenging legacy processes, and driving adoption of modern engineering and governance practices.
Maintain a hands-on role when necessary—supporting architecture decisions, troubleshooting complex platform issues, and guiding strategic proofs of concept.