Data Engineering Director

Courier Newsroom, Inc.•New York, NY

3d•Remote

About The Position

You'll lead a small team of data engineers supporting fast-moving newsrooms and different functions across the organization. This is equal parts technical leadership and individual contribution: architect solutions that drive business impact, work with the larger organization to define team goals, participate in and oversee development of data pipelines, and scale Courier’s data infrastructure building for its future. Your team's output feeds our data analysts, who in turn support reporters, editors, and newsroom leadership. You've done this before. You communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders without condescension. You'll need to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery, making architectural decisions that serve both immediate deadlines and long-term maintainability. You build systems that your team can maintain without you. Most importantly, you can manage both up and down: setting realistic expectations with leadership while creating space for your engineers to do their best work.

Requirements

Python development and debugging: Strong command of the language for data ingestion, transformation, and pipeline development
Data Pipeline management: Data modeling, orchestration, transformation, and query optimization at scale. Google BigQuery, Dagster+, dbt preferred
Data extraction: Proven experience with REST APIs, web scraping, and creative data acquisition
Public Cloud management: Understanding of billing and monitoring, GCP preferred
Application architecture: fundamental knowledge of app development and scaling for delivering data in unique ways
JIRA: Training in Agile methodology is preferred

Responsibilities

Team leadership: Establish and manage team goals, set technical direction, and remove blockers
Mentor data engineers: Provide guidance on project architectural decisions, give feedback on code, and be a partner in guiding professional development
Architecture decisions: Oversee data infrastructure design that scales with newsroom needs while remaining flexible enough to pivot when priorities shift
Stakeholder partnership: Understand business needs and translate them into delivering value to Courier’s stakeholders, readers, and followers
Hands-on engineering: Contribute to pipeline codebases when necessary, peer review and give guidance on code development.
Technical strategy: Balance speed and sustainability in a deadline-driven environment