Director of Data Engineering

Jet Support Services•Chicago, IL

About The Position

JSSI, a leading independent provider of hourly cost maintenance programs for business aviation, is seeking a Director of Data Engineering. This role is crucial for owning and advancing the company's data platform, built on Microsoft Fabric and Azure. The Director will be a player-coach, leading a team of 2-5 engineers while remaining hands-on in architecting solutions, developing pipelines, and setting technical standards. The primary goal is to transform raw data into a reliable foundation for analytics and AI initiatives, ensuring data quality and trustworthiness. This position is key to enabling the company's AI roadmap and empowering the analytics team by resolving data quality and availability issues at the source. The Director will also be responsible for supporting broader ML initiatives and representing the data engineering function in leadership discussions to shape JSSI's data strategy.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in data engineering, with a track record of building and scaling data platforms in production environments.
3+ years in a leadership role managing engineers, with demonstrated ability to develop talent and build team culture.
Experience as a player-coach — comfortable rolling up your sleeves while also setting direction for the team.
Deep expertise with Microsoft Fabric, including Lakehouse and Warehouse architecture, pipelines, and OneLake.
Strong hands-on experience with Azure cloud infrastructure and Azure Data services.
Proficiency in SQL and Python for data engineering and pipeline development.
Experience designing and implementing ETL pipelines across complex, multi-source environments.
Familiarity with CI/CD practices and Git-based deployment workflows for data platforms.
Experience with data governance platforms (Microsoft Purview preferred) and semantic layer design.
Working knowledge of Power BI and enterprise reporting architectures.
Familiarity with AI/ML data patterns and building data products that support machine learning use cases.
Strong communicator who can translate technical complexity into clear language for business stakeholders.
Collaborative partner who works well across analytics, product, and business teams.
High ownership mindset — treats data as a product and holds self accountable for its quality and reliability.

Responsibilities

Own the Microsoft Fabric Platform, including architecture, governance, performance, and access control.
Drive the roadmap for the platform, including CI/CD enablement, Git integration, and centralized ingestion workspace design.
Manage Fabric capacity, right-sizing, backup, and disaster recovery.
Build and operate reliable data pipelines connecting source systems into clean, usable data.
Establish monitoring, alerting, and SLA standards for pipeline reliability.
Establish a single source of truth across all systems and acquisitions.
Build and maintain enterprise semantic models for analytics, reporting, and AI use cases.
Partner with data governance to implement Microsoft Purview for cataloging, classification, and data privacy.
Enable the analytics team by solving data quality and availability issues at the source.
Build the data foundation for AI initiatives, enabling the organization to move from insight to action.
Develop and support AI data agents to expand analytics delivery.
Support ML initiatives.
Manage and mentor a team of 2-5 data engineers, setting technical standards and fostering a high-performance culture.
Partner cross-functionally with analytics, product, and business stakeholders.
Represent data engineering in leadership discussions and help shape JSSI's broader data strategy.