Director, Head of Data

AAA Life Insurance Company•Livonia, MI

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

AAA Life is a respected and trusted American brand that has been focusing on Life Insurance and Annuity Products since 1969. At AAA Life we have over 1.8 million policies where we take pride in earning the trust of our policyholders who understand our promise to be there for them – and their families – when we’re needed most. By joining the AAA Life team, you are joining a company that genuinely cares about helping each other, with a devotion to protect the lives of those around us. We embrace a diverse, equitable, inclusive culture where all associates can feel a sense of belonging and use their unique talents and perspective to influence, innovate, motivate, and thrive. The Director, Head of Data provides the vision and leadership for how AAA Life manages and uses data across the company. This role is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a modern data environment that delivers accurate, reliable, and accessible information to support decision making, operational performance, and long-term growth throughout the enterprise. The Director oversees data architecture, engineering, governance, and analytics enablement and ensures that data is organized, safeguarded, and used responsibly across all business units. This includes establishing clear ownership, strong quality standards, and consistent practices that continually build trust in the company’s data. The role works closely with technology, actuarial, finance, distribution, product, and member experience teams to understand needs, set priorities, and ensure data consumers have the right information at the right time. This includes providing the insights and data foundations that help agents succeed in the field and serve members with clarity and confidence. The Director builds and runs a high-performing team and creates the structure needed to scale data capabilities as the company modernizes. This technically-adept leader sets direction, drives alignment, and ensures that data becomes a managed asset that supports member value, operational efficiency, agent success, and future business opportunities.

Requirements

10 years in data engineering, data architecture, or data analytics leadership roles.
Experience leading data programs in a regulated industry such as life insurance, financial services, or healthcare.
Demonstrated success building modern data platforms in cloud environments.
Strong understanding and demonstrated experience building trusted data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality principles.
Experience leading technology teams through transformation and modernization.
Ability to communicate clearly with, drive alignment with, and influence senior leaders.
Strong communication skills with the ability to present complex concepts concisely.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Snowflake, DBT, event streaming architectures, API integration patterns, and semantic modeling.
Experience building domain-based and business-empowered data products.
Familiarity with all tiers of medallion data architectures, data lake, data warehouse, and data lakehouse concepts.
Familiarity with Member 360 concepts, actuarial data needs, and operational analytics.

Responsibilities

Data Strategy and Architecture
Define and maintain the enterprise data strategy aligned to the company’s North Star architecture
Design and evolve the data platform including semantic layer, operational data layer, and integration patterns.
Establish domain-aligned data products with clear ownership, quality expectations, and SLAs.
Partner with enterprise architecture to ensure data decisions align with platform, cloud, and integration strategies.
Data Engineering and Delivery
Oversee delivery of data pipelines, ingestion patterns, event streaming, and operational data flows.
Lead teams in building Member 360, Actuarial Valuation data, financial reporting data, policy and claims domains, and other priority data products.
Ensure timely delivery of strategic data initiatives including CDC enablement, event modeling, and read models.
Implement reliable processes for deployment, monitoring, observability, and data quality measurement.
Data Governance and Stewardship
Stand up and chair the Data Council with business and technology leaders.
Define data policies, lineage, cataloging, access controls, retention, and metadata standards.
Develop a clear data ownership model across domains with accountability for quality and adoption.
Establish a data quality framework with automated checks, issue management, and scorecards.
Leadership and Team Development
Build and lead multi-disciplinary data squads including engineering, modeling, analytics enablement, and governance.
Develop a high-performance, product-oriented team structure aligned with domains such as Policy, Claims, Finance, Member Experience, and Agent Experience.
Partner with AAAL Academy on talent development, training paths, and skill assessments.
Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, curiosity, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Business Partnership and Strategy
Work closely with Finance, Actuarial, Product, Member Services, Distribution, and Digital Experience to deliver data that drives business outcomes.
Translate business needs into data priorities with clear value, sequencing, and measurable impact.
Communicate data insights, progress, risks, and decisions to senior leadership.
Support modernization efforts including Life+ decommission, platform migrations, experience rebuilds, and operational optimization.