Director, Business Intelligence

Topgolf•Dallas, TX

About The Position

The Director, Business Intelligence is the senior leader accountable for business intelligence end to end, including data quality and consistency, metric governance, self-service access, and the use of analytics and AI to improve decisions and how work gets done. The role establishes a trusted data foundation that enables teams across Topgolf to use AI confidently. It leads a BI team of approximately 20 product owners and data engineers, partners with commercial, operations, finance, and venue leaders, and represents analytics in Technology planning and architecture decisions. The position reports to the VP of Finance and BI and serves the whole company, not Finance alone. In the first 12 months, success includes establishing certified metrics used consistently by executives, Finance, and venue leaders; assigning owners to certified metrics and retiring conflicting reports and calculations; growing self-service use so business users can answer routine questions without tickets; providing venue leaders with trusted operational views; enabling AI assistants to answer questions from certified metrics while respecting access controls and supporting review and correction; and developing advanced forecasting for revenue, demand, and business performance. The Director leads and develops the BI team, sets priorities and delivery standards, and owns the BI product roadmap, reporting and analytics platform, and annual BI budget. The role establishes data quality, modeling, metric governance, reporting review, privacy, and AI governance practices; owns executive scorecards and aligns leadership and board metrics with Finance at close; supports a trusted guest and venue view across company systems; and builds self-service capabilities for corporate stakeholders and venue leaders. It partners with Technology and Data Engineering on architecture, integrations, platform reliability, data freshness, performance, security, and cost, while managing vendors, renewals, and consumption. The role also helps define where forecasting, segmentation, and other advanced analytics work is performed and how outputs are governed and published.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in business intelligence, analytics, or analytics engineering, including 5+ years leading teams.
A track record of resolving data trust issues, retiring conflicting reports, and establishing durable governance, self-service, and adoption programs.
Experience managing external consulting or systems-integration partners on data or BI programs.
Credibility with senior Finance and venue operations leaders, with the ability to influence across business and technology teams without authority.
Deep technical credibility in enterprise BI and cloud data warehouse platforms, SQL, and dimensional modeling, and judgment to evaluate and adopt platforms as the business changes.
Experience owning a significant budget, managing vendors, and forecasting consumption-based cloud spend.
Experience leading adoption of AI-enabled analytics on governed enterprise data, including personal daily use of AI and measurable improvement in decisions or productivity.
Experience in a multi-unit, shift-based business such as restaurant, hospitality, entertainment, or retail, with working knowledge of venue-level P&L, labor, and guest analytics.
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Analytics, Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience building a guest or customer 360 view.
Experience with enterprise data governance forums.
Familiarity with FinOps and software capitalization (ASC 350-40 / ASU 2018-15).

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop the BI team of product owners and reporting engineers; set priorities, delivery speed and predictability, and develop future leaders.
Coach product owners in requirements gathering, backlog management, acceptance criteria, stakeholder communication, and making appropriate trade-offs.
Set and enforce standards for SQL, data modeling, version control, code review, testing, documentation, and dashboard design.
Establish a disciplined delivery cadence for intake, prioritization, release planning, and review, balancing executive requests, roadmap commitments, and technical debt.
Set expectations for daily AI use by the team to improve speed and quality, with human review of AI-generated work.
Establish a data quality framework and maintain accurate, accessible, well-documented curated models.
Make curated models authoritative sources for core business metrics, require end-to-end testing of metrics, and retire conflicting reports and calculations.
Define governance processes for new metrics, including ownership, approvals, calculation logic, validation, documentation, and change control.
Chair a data governance group that reviews and approves reporting for broad audiences, and partner with Security and Compliance on access, PII, consent, retention, and privacy requirements.
Govern AI-enabled analytics by defining data access, answer validation, and processes for reporting and correcting errors.
Connect visitation, spend, membership, segment, channel, promotions, frequency, and occasion data across POS, reservations, loyalty, marketing, labor, finance, and survey systems into a trusted guest and venue view within privacy requirements.
Own the BI product roadmap across corporate functions and venue operations, prioritizing enterprise value and making trade-offs when demand exceeds capacity.
Serve corporate stakeholders who need depth and cross-venue comparisons and venue leaders who need concise operational views, including bay utilization, labor against demand, food and beverage, and event performance.
Build self-service reporting capabilities, including plain-language questions answered from certified data; measure adoption, enable users, and retire low-usage assets.
Own the executive scorecard and metrics reported to leadership and the board, reconciling them with Finance at each close.
Build relationships with Data Engineering, Application Development, Product, Infrastructure, and Security, and represent reporting in planning and design forums.
Participate early in architecture and design reviews, system and integration intake, and vendor selection so data access, event capture, and reporting requirements are addressed before systems are built.
Partner with Data Engineering on pipeline reliability, data freshness, query performance, warehouse sizing, and cost; document responsibilities from source data to certified metric.
Set a point of view on the number of data platforms and reporting tools required and lead consolidation when it reduces cost and confusion.
Work with data science and advanced analytics teams to determine where forecasting, segmentation, and modeling work belongs and how its outputs are governed and published.
Leverage MCP-connected data sources and LLM-enabled analytics.
Establish data contracts and change-notification expectations with upstream system owners.
Own the reporting and analytics platform, including user access controls, and ensure reliability, security, and capacity meet defined standards.
Own the annual BI budget for software, licensing, cloud consumption, and professional services; develop and defend the plan and manage spending through the year.
Ensure the team validates monthly vendor charges against contracted rates and expected consumption and resolves material discrepancies.
Improve cost efficiency through query optimization, capacity right-sizing, license true-ups, and retirement of unused tools and assets.
Lead vendor renewals and negotiations using usage data and business justification, in partnership with Procurement and Legal.