Director, Data Engineering & Analytics

Gray Construction•Lexington, KY

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Gray Construction's Information Services team has a Director, Data Engineering & Analytics role open in their Lexington, KY location. Gray is a fully integrated design-builder delivering end-to-end solutions across construction, professional services, specialty equipment, and real estate. Since 1960, Gray has grown from a regional contractor to a nationally ranked industry leader, serving top domestic and international companies in the following markets: Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, Data Centers, Advanced Technology, and Distribution. Our integrated approach allows us to deliver value at every phase of a project—from designing and building state-of-the-art facilities to fabricating custom process equipment and implementing advanced automation. But what truly defines Gray is our people. Our success is driven by passionate, collaborative team members who take pride in their work, value strong relationships, and are committed to doing the right thing for our customers and one another. At Gray, you’ll find a culture built on teamwork, accountability, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. “Personal growth precedes Gray’s growth.” – Stephen Gray, President & CEO, Gray, Inc. The Director of Data Engineering & Analytics is responsible for leading the enterprise data architecture and delivery capabilities that power analytics, reporting, and AI-driven initiatives across the Gray, Inc family of companies. This role leads data engineering and analytics functions to deliver scalable, secure, and high-quality data services, ensuring the business has trusted, accessible data to drive operational excellence, project performance, and innovation. This position partners closely with other Technology Services and business teams by providing production-ready, governed, and scalable data pipelines and platforms. This includes leading and enabling data management best practices, identifying common tools and frameworks, and partnering with Gray’s functional information groups to ensure a cohesive/integrated execution of the organization’s data management to support analytics, reporting and artificial intelligence initiatives that meets Gray’s business and customer needs. With the goal of improving the integrity and processes surrounding data management as well as increasing Gray’s maturity level with enterprise-wide data management and analytics, this position will work with the Chief Information Officer, data governance team, other TS management as well as other business analysts and business leaders to assess corporate data management and identify opportunities for improvement. This position will also drive best practices for solution development internally in Technology Services to keep a process and data centric approach to all solutions and applying the right technology to solve problems as a secondary means to support the business process with the cleanest data outcomes. As a result, this position will find solutions and lead projects to implement improvements in the above identified areas.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics, or software engineering
5+ years of leadership experience managing technical teams
Bachelor’s degree from a four-year college or university required.
Experience delivering enterprise-scale data platforms in complex, multi-system environments
Industry experience in construction, engineering, or project-based businesses strongly preferred
Strong knowledge of modern data architectures (data lakehouse, warehouse, distributed processing)
Experience with cloud data platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and modern tooling ecosystems
Experience with pipeline orchestration and transformation tools (e.g., ADF, Airflow, dbt)
Familiarity with BI/analytics platforms (e.g., Power BI) and semantic modeling concepts
Understanding of data requirements for AI/ML (feature pipelines, data quality, large-scale datasets)
Strong executive communication skills with the ability to translate technical concepts into business value
Proven ability to align data initiatives with operational and financial outcomes
Experience balancing innovation, scalability, and cost management
Results orientated individual with the ability to deliver quality, on-time results
Must have a willingness to educate their coworkers, have patience and the capability to support end-users
Excellent verbal and written communication skills required
Must be well organized, efficient, detail-oriented, and able to work independently as well as a member of a team
Demonstrate a rigorous, and analytical problem-solving approach, leading information gathering sessions and deliver results
The new team member should be an energetic, self-motivated individual who enjoys a team environment, as well as a passion for collaboration and professional development. If you are a high achiever striving to exceed expectations in a fast-paced innovative company, then Gray is the place for you.
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Nice To Haves

Industry experience in construction, engineering, or project-based businesses strongly preferred

Responsibilities

Define and execute the enterprise data architecture strategy aligned with business and technology priorities
Design and govern scalable data platforms (data lakehouse/warehouse, domain-oriented data models, semantic layers)
Establish standards for data modeling, integration patterns, metadata, lineage, and observability
Ensure architecture supports construction-specific data domains (e.g., project performance, cost, schedule, field operations, design systems)
Lead the development and operation of robust, scalable data pipelines (ETL/ELT, streaming where applicable)
Ensure high availability, performance, and reliability of data platforms and services
Drive platform scalability and cost optimization across cloud data environments
Enable reusable, product-oriented data services for enterprise consumption
Oversee delivery of curated datasets, semantic layers, and data services supporting reporting and analytics use cases
Partner with business stakeholders to ensure consistent definitions of key metrics (cost, margin, schedule performance, productivity)
Enable self-service analytics while maintaining governance and data quality standards
Collaborate with BI teams (e.g., Power BI) to improve reliability, usability, and adoption of analytics solutions
Provide high-quality, production-ready data pipelines and feature-ready datasets to support AI and machine learning initiatives
Partner with AI Engineering to ensure data availability, timeliness, and scalability for model development and deployment
Support MLOps readiness from a data perspective (data versioning, lineage, and reproducibility)
Ensure data environments meet performance and governance requirements for AI workloads
Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements
Implement controls for sensitive project, financial, and client data
Follow internal standards, system integration and security practices, and document changes and enhancements.
Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of data engineers, analytics engineers, and data architects
Partner with business leaders to prioritize high-value data initiatives
Drive a product-oriented mindset focused on delivering measurable business value
Provide executive reporting on data platform performance, adoption, and business impact
Assumes responsibility for acquiring and maintaining ongoing knowledge of existing business processes at Gray that support data collection and consumption for customers, and other critical data points.
Responsible for all aspects of project management to implement changes with clear project communication and change management.
Other duties as assigned.