Director, Data Collective

Sovrn is seeking a Director, Data Collective to lead our end-to-end data platform, encompassing pipelines, lakehouse, data services, and cloud infrastructure. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role where you will own team composition, lead architecture and design, and make critical technical decisions. You will work with a modern stack, including LLMs and agentic tooling, and drive our AI-native data engineering practices at exchange scale.

About Sovrn:

Sovrn is a Software and Data business dedicated to helping Open Web businesses remain independent by providing them with tools to understand their business better, operate more efficiently, and increase their revenue.

About the Role:

As the Director, Data Collective, you will lead the team responsible for Sovrn's data platform. This includes driving architectural decisions, setting technical and cultural standards, mentoring engineers, and managing operational excellence and cost.

What You'll Be Doing:

Team Leadership & Composition:

• Own team skill mix, hiring, and performance management for engineers of all levels.
• Set technical and cultural standards for design, code review, on-call, and collaboration.
• Mentor and grow engineers through hands-on collaboration and coaching.
• Partner with engineering leadership on planning, budgeting, and roadmap tradeoffs.

Data Platform Architecture & Engineering:

• Drive architectural decisions across pipeline design, data modeling, lakehouse, and data services.
• Contribute significantly to the design of high-throughput streaming, petabyte-scale storage, and query systems.
• Lead design reviews and set technical standards for engineering rigor and operational excellence.
• Make critical tradeoffs on performance, cost, governance, and reliability.

AI & Modern Data Engineering Practice:

• Set the team's direction for AI-native data engineering, identifying high-leverage applications of LLMs, RAG, and AI-assisted tooling.
• Establish standards for evaluating, trusting, and operating AI-powered systems in production.
• Identify high-leverage AI applications in the data stack, such as intelligent pipeline optimization and anomaly detection.

Operational Excellence & Cost Management:

• Own the operational posture of the data platform, including SLOs, on-call health, and incident response.
• Manage the infrastructure cost footprint and drive structural cost improvements.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC), policy-as-code, governance frameworks, and CI/CD.
• Ensure a balance between new capabilities, platform health, and tech debt.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Provide domain expertise to enable business growth through data services.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, AI/ML, Platform, and Security teams.
• Serve as a senior counsel to all data stakeholders.
• Communicate clearly at multiple levels, from engineers to executives.

A Successful Candidate Will Have:

• 10+ years of software/data engineering experience with a strong track record in data platforms or distributed systems.
• 4+ years of leadership experience, including hiring and performance management.
• Deep, current technical proficiency and hands-on experience.
• Hands-on experience with big data and distributed processing in AWS (Python, Spark, Kafka/Redpanda, Databricks).
• Experience operating data systems at scale, including real-time streaming and batch pipelines.
• Working knowledge of cloud platform engineering practices (IaC, CI/CD, observability, cost management).
• Track record of leading or substantially contributing to AI/agentic engineering efforts in production.
• Hands-on experience operating production vector databases at scale.
• Familiarity with adtech data infrastructure is a strong plus.
• Experience with data security and compliance (PII, CCPA, GDPR).
• Excellent communication skills for architectural concepts and team strategy.
• Ability to drive decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

Location: Boulder, CO (In-office or hybrid)

Compensation and Benefits:

• Base salary: $225,000 - $250,000 annually.
• Total compensation includes bonus and equity.
• Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, paid parental leave, 401(k) with match, holidays, and flexible vacation.