Associate Director, Data Platforms

Role Summary

Reporting to the Executive Director of Data and Analytics as Associate Director of Data Platforms, you will own the enterprise data platform strategy, architecture, and execution, with a strong focus on Microsoft Fabric. This role is responsible for designing and operating a scalable, secure, and globally available data platform that supports analytical and operational data products. The AD will ensure platform reliability (SLAs), performance, governance, and cost efficiency, while enabling teams to build trusted data pipelines and reusable data products.

Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture & Strategy: Own the end-to-end Microsoft Fabric architecture, including Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, OneLake, Data Pipelines, Notebooks, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI integration.
• Define and maintain reference architectures, design standards, and best practices for enterprise data platforms.
• Drive global, multi-region scalability, resiliency, and performance of the data platform.
• Lead platform modernization, migrations, and roadmap evolution aligned to business needs.
• Platform Operations & SLAs: Own platform SLAs, SLOs, and operational KPIs (availability, latency, data freshness, cost).
• Establish monitoring, alerting, incident management, and on-call processes.
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity for critical data workloads.
• Manage platform capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization.
• Data Pipelines & Engineering Enablement: Provide architectural oversight for batch and streaming data pipelines built on Fabric.
• Define patterns for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and data quality.
• Enable CI/CD, automation, and Infrastructure-as-Code for platform components.
• Partner with data engineering teams to ensure pipelines are reliable, scalable, and reusable.
• Governance, Security & Compliance: Define and enforce data governance, security, and access control within Fabric.
• Implement metadata management, lineage, auditing, and data classification.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, privacy, and enterprise security requirements.
• Partner closely with the Cyber Security and Risk teams to ensure the data platform complies with enterprise security standards, policies, and controls.
• Ensure Microsoft Fabric architecture aligns with identity, access management, encryption, network security, and data protection standards.
• Support security reviews, threat modeling, audits, and remediation activities for the data platform.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Act as a technical leader and mentor for platform and data engineering teams.
• Partner with Cloud, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and Application teams.
• Collaborate closely with Analytics leaders to enable scalable, reliable data pipelines and curated datasets that support enterprise reporting and insights.
• Partner with Data Science and Advanced Analytics teams to ensure the platform supports future-ready analytical, AI/ML, and experimentation use cases.
• Influence stakeholders and leadership through clear communication of platform strategy and trade-offs.
• Contribute to vendor engagement and evaluation (Microsoft, tooling ecosystem).

Qualifications

• Required: 10-12+ years of experience in data engineering, data platforms, or cloud architecture.
• Required: Strong 2+ hands-on and architectural experience with Microsoft Fabric (or 8+ deep experience in Azure data services with Fabric adoption).
• Required: Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, enterprise data platforms.
• Required: Experience owning platform SLAs, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Required: Strong understanding of data pipelines, Lakehouse architecture, and data warehousing.
• Required: Experience with global / multi-region deployments and enterprise security models.
• Required: Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Preferred: Experience in product-oriented data platforms or data mesh implementations.
• Preferred: Familiarity with DevOps / DataOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Preferred: Experience supporting AI/ML and advanced analytics workloads.
• Preferred: Prior leadership experience managing senior engineers or platform teams.

Skills

• Strategic Thinking: Ability to translate business priorities into an actionable analytics strategy.
• Analytical Excellence: Demonstrates strong quantitative skills and ensures rigor, transparency, and clarity in insights.
• Influence & Communication: Communicates complex concepts simply, shapes decisions, and engages senior leadership effectively.
• Collaboration: Works effectively across functions and builds strong partnerships.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement: Drives modernization, automation, and adoption of new technologies.
• Results Orientation: Delivers high-quality work, manages competing priorities, and operates with a bias toward action.