Director of Data & Analytics

Kipu Systems• US,

About The Position

Kipu is bettering the behavioral health landscape, helping treatment centers achieve the best outcomes, and empowering patients and caregivers on every step of the recovery journey. Join us in our work to advance behavioral health care in our communities. Our innovative solutions support providers in treating addiction, eating disorders, and many other behavioral health conditions. Our EMR, CRM, and revenue cycle solutions help behavioral health facilities succeed in managing their patient’s entire care journey, but it’s through our people that we truly make a difference. We are looking for a Director, Data & Analytics to build Kipu’s data and analytics practice from the ground up. You will own the full stack, from the pipelines and the warehouse through to the dashboards people use to make decisions. Your role is to give Kipu fast, reliable numbers and a platform the whole company can build on. You will run a small team, a Data Engineer and an Analytics Engineer, and stay close enough to the work to make the decisions on architecture and tooling. This is a player-coach role: you lead the team and you also do the work. You will not be starting from scratch. We already have an outside partner building parts of the platform, and you will own that relationship. Much of the early work is directing that partner, treating them as an extension of your team, and bringing the knowledge back in-house as you go. We are not looking to replace them. We want the understanding and the ownership to live inside Kipu, so the partner remains a choice and not a dependency. Because the function is new, you will decide how it runs rather than inherit an existing setup. It is a greenfield role, so expect some ambiguity and considerable room to shape the function. What is not flexible is how we treat the data. Kipu works in behavioral health, so the numbers you build help treatment centers care for real people. Privacy and strong governance are part of the work from the start.

Requirements

8+ years in data and analytics, with 3+ years leading a data or analytics team.
You have designed and operated a modern data platform from ingestion through reporting.
Strong SQL and hands-on data modeling. You have built a warehouse and the dimensional models beneath it.
Strong command of ELT, orchestration, and pipeline reliability.
You have owned a BI and visualization layer and driven its adoption across teams.
Systems thinker. You see how data and decisions connect across the business.
You ask what the data actually says before accepting the prevailing assumption.
Fluent in both business and technology. You can work in a pipeline and present to the executive team in the same day.
High emotional intelligence. You build trust with skeptical stakeholders and earn it through accuracy and consistency. You can hold the conversation where the data contradicts someone’s instinct without damaging the relationship.
You manage outside partners well. You direct them, hold them accountable, and learn from them rather than ceding control.
Player-coach. You run the team and still do the work.
You own outcomes, not tasks. You prioritize by what matters, follow through, and flag risk early.
You solve problems, you don’t just report them. You break them down, try things, and use the tools, including AI, to do better and faster work.
You think past the task in front of you. You connect your work to where the company is going and see problems before they land.
You work across teams. You line people up early, handle competing priorities, and communicate clearly, including when the message is hard.
You keep the customer in view, internal or external. You make calls that hold up from their side of the table.
You adapt. Priorities shift here. You move with them, help others do the same, and keep delivering while things change.
You make the team better to be on. You bring people in, assume good intent, and hold the bar on how we treat each other.

Nice To Haves

Databricks and Azure, where our platform runs.
Power BI, our reporting tool.
dbt or similar transformation tooling.
SaaS or high-growth company experience.
Healthcare or behavioral health, where HIPAA and PHI shape how you handle data.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow the data and analytics engineering team.
Set the standard for rigor and data-driven decisions, and hold the team to it.
Build the capacity and process that scale as the company grows.
Own the design and build of Kipu’s data platform: the warehouse, the ingestion pipelines, and the transformation layers. The platform runs on Databricks and Azure.
Set the standards for data modeling, pipeline reliability, and data quality.
Make the decisions on the data stack: ELT, transformation, orchestration, and observability.
Partner with Engineering and Business Systems on data contracts and source-system quality.
Own the relationship with our outside data partner and everything they deliver.
Direct and delegate to the partner as an extension of the team, and hold their work to the same standard as internal work.
Understand how everything they build works, so Kipu can run, support, and extend it independently.
Bring knowledge and ownership in-house over time, so the platform does not depend on any single outside firm. We continue to use the partner by choice, not necessity.
Build the analytics and reporting layer that every team relies on, in Power BI.
Turn business questions into clear dashboards and analysis that teams rely on.
Move teams to self-serve analytics so they can answer their own questions directly.
Set and enforce governance: definitions, ownership, lineage, and access controls.
Build the data quality framework so the business trusts the numbers.
Meet HIPAA requirements for how the platform handles data: access controls, audit trails, and least-privilege access.
Be the person leadership turns to for what the data says and what it means.
Translate an unstructured business question into a clear analytical answer, then translate the answer back into plain language.
Make data accessible across the company, so teams can find answers themselves.
Turn strategy into priorities your team can act on, and you set the operating rhythm.
Delegate real ownership and build the team’s capacity. You don’t become the bottleneck.
Grow your people. You coach honestly, develop their strengths, and address performance directly.
Hold the team to a high bar. You fix recurring problems at the root and you recognize good work.
Lead across functions. You make it clear who decides what, and you resolve the conflicts that stall work.
Make sound calls with incomplete information, and you own how they turn out.