Director of Data Platform Engineering (26-27)

IDEA Public Schools • El Paso, TX

4d • $119,000 - $142,800

About The Position

The Director of Data Platform Engineering leads the team responsible for building, operating, and optimizing IDEA's data infrastructure. This leader ensures the data platform is reliable, scalable, secure, and performant—enabling Analytics Engineering, Data Science, Business Intelligence, and Research teams to deliver insights that improve student outcomes across IDEA Public Schools.

Reporting to the Managing Director of Data Platform & Engineering, this role translates architectural vision into operational reality through disciplined engineering execution, automation-first practices, and a relentless focus on platform reliability. This leader manages the platform engineering team through IDEA's critical transition from legacy ETL systems to a modern Snowflake-based data lakehouse, balancing the urgency of modernization with the stability requirements of production operations.

This role is central to achieving IDEA's goal of reducing data source onboarding from years to days through automated ingestion, robust orchestration, and comprehensive DataOps practices.

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, OR equivalent practical experience
• Experience: Minimum 7 years in data engineering, platform engineering, data infrastructure, or related technical roles
• Leadership experience: At least 3 years in technical leadership or people management role leading data/platform engineering teams
• Cloud platform experience: Demonstrated hands-on experience building and operating cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or similar) in production environments
• Modernization experience: Proven track record migrating from legacy ETL systems to modern cloud-native ELT platforms
• Team development: Experience hiring, mentoring, and developing data engineers from junior to senior levels

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree: Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related technical field
• Snowflake expertise: SnowPro Core or Advanced certification, or deep hands-on Snowflake experience
• Multi-domain environments: Experience building platforms supporting multiple business units, states, or regions with federated operations
• Education sector: Experience with K-12 education data systems (student information systems, assessment platforms, education data standards)
• DataOps/SRE background: Formal training or deep experience in site reliability engineering, platform reliability, or DataOps practices
• Open source contributions: Active participation in data engineering communities, conference presentations, or technical blog posts demonstrating thought leadership

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing platform engineering team of 4 direct reports with diverse skill sets (infrastructure, automation, legacy systems)
• Lead day-to-day build out and operation of IDEA's Snowflake-based data platform ensuring production-grade reliability, security, and performance
• Oversee Snowflake environment management including warehouse sizing, resource monitors, cost optimization, role-based access control, and performance tuning
• Ensure platform infrastructure meets defined SLAs for data freshness, pipeline reliability, and system availability
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes that surface issues early and drive durable fixes
• Partner with IT Security and Data Governance to ensure platform meets enterprise standards for access controls, audit trails, and compliance
• Oversee implementation and operation of automated ELT pipelines from 20-30+ source systems (PowerSchool, assessment platforms, SIS systems, financial systems) into Snowflake
• Ensure ingestion pipelines meet standards for reliability, data freshness, schema evolution handling, and error recovery
• Lead evaluation and operational management of ingestion tools (Fivetran, Airbyte) ensuring consistent implementation patterns
• Partner with Analytics Engineering to ensure Bronze layer (raw data landing) supports downstream transformation needs without creating coupling
• Drive "onboarding in days not years" goal through templated ingestion patterns, automated connector setup, and self-service enablement
• Monitor data pipeline health through observability dashboards and proactive alerting
• Partner with DataOps Engineer to embed CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment automation across all platform work
• Ensure infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform) for all Snowflake resources, reducing manual configuration and enabling reproducibility
• Implement deployment standards including version control (Git), code review, automated testing, and rollback procedures
• Drive platform reliability through SLO/SLA definition, error budgets, and post-incident reviews that prevent recurrence
• Establish observability practices ensuring visibility into pipeline performance, data quality, costs, and system health
• Balance reliability work (automation, monitoring, technical debt) with delivery commitments (new data sources, platform features)
• Serve as primary technical partner to Manager of Analytics Engineering, ensuring platform capabilities support dbt development, testing, and data product delivery
• Work closely with Data Platform Architect to implement architectural standards faithfully while surfacing execution challenges and operational realities that should inform future design
• Collaborate with Director of Data Governance to ensure platform enforces data quality rules, access policies, and metadata standards
• Partner with Director of Business Intelligence and MD of Data Science & Analytics to understand platform requirements for dashboards and advanced analytics
• Interface with IT infrastructure team on networking, security, gateway management, and on-prem and/or cloud service integration
• Provide light oversight to Data Warehouse Manager maintaining production stability of legacy SSIS/SQL Server systems during 18-month modernization period
• Establish clear boundaries preventing legacy work from consuming modern team capacity
• Set aggressive migration timelines with executive alignment
• Triage legacy incidents, prioritizing only business-critical issues while deferring optimization and enhancements
• Protect modern team focus: legacy maintenance is separate from modern platform development
• Develop quarterly platform engineering roadmap balancing new capabilities, reliability improvements, and technical debt reduction
• Translate business requirements into platform capabilities, data source priorities, and infrastructure investments
• Provide input to Data Platform Architect on architectural decisions based on operational experience and execution constraints
• Participate in tool evaluations (ingestion, orchestration, observability) with hands-on proof-of-concept work
• Provide clear, timely communication about platform health, incidents, risks, and planned improvements to MD, peer managers, and stakeholder
• Translate technical platform issues into operational and business impact for non-technical audience
• Run regular platform demos showcasing new capabilities, performance improvements, and reliability wins
• Establish trust through transparency about what's working, what's not, and what's being done to improve
• Support operational management of Snowflake, Fivetran/Airbyte, and orchestration platforms
• Ensure tools are implemented using consistent patterns with clear ownership and documentation
• Identify sources of operational friction, manual toil, and platform fragility through metrics and team feedback

Benefits

• medical, dental, and vision plans, disability, life insurance, parenting benefits, flexible spending account options, generous vacation time, referral bonuses, professional development, and a 403(b) plan

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director