Director of Engineering, Data

fb9e7da1-2660-46a2-9ffc-154a66684510•Los Angeles, CA

1d•$176,000 - $235,000

About The Position

BuildOps is hiring a Director of Engineering, Data to build and lead its unified Data & AI engineering function. The role owns the platforms, pipelines, quality standards, and operating discipline that power AI and ML products and help customers trust BuildOps as their system of record. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, the Director will help define the company’s data strategy over the next three to five years and shape how data-powered products are built. This foundational leadership role calls for someone who can set long-term architectural direction while staying close to implementation and operational work, and who has experience scaling data organizations from early-stage environments to operational excellence.

Requirements

10+ years in data or software engineering, including experience building and scaling teams of 10+ engineers.
A track record of hiring well, growing leaders, and leading through both managers and individual contributors.
Deep hands-on experience with modern data platforms, including a cloud warehouse or lakehouse such as Snowflake or Databricks, dbt and ELT patterns, orchestration tools such as Airflow, and streaming technologies such as Kafka or Kinesis.
Direct experience building data systems that support production ML use cases, with an understanding of feature stores, training data, real-time inference, and the tradeoffs involved in building versus buying ML platform capabilities.
A track record of operational excellence in data, including monitoring, SLAs, incident response, and data quality practices applied with rigor comparable to customer-facing systems.
Experience delivering customer-facing data products such as reporting, analytics, or APIs in B2B SaaS environments where performance, reliability, and trust matter.
Strong architectural judgment, including when to build or buy, how to design for change, and how to sequence investments behind validated needs instead of overbuilding.
A pragmatic approach to governance, with security and compliance built in, current documentation and contracts, and access models that balance control with self-service.
Comfort with ambiguity and greenfield work, the ability to move quickly and ship an MVP while making sound decisions for long-term scale.
Willingness to write code, debug issues, and carry operational responsibility when needed while maintaining a clear multi-year vision.
Ability to influence across Product, Engineering, GTM, Finance, and the executive team; build trust; communicate clearly; and push back when priorities are misaligned.
Ability to translate technical decisions into business impact and business goals into technical direction.

Nice To Haves

AWS experience is strongly preferred.
Early-stage or scale-up experience in Series B through D companies.
Experience in vertical SaaS or construction technology.

Responsibilities

Own BuildOps' data platform and architecture end to end, including ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and an ML and streaming strategy that evolves with the business and scales efficiently.
Build scalable, repeatable customer and partner data onboarding capabilities that bring data into BuildOps quickly and reliably, reducing time to first value.
Run data systems with production-grade discipline, including monitoring, alerting, SLAs, incident response, lineage, freshness, and clear ownership for critical datasets.
Create the data foundation required for AI and ML products, with accurate, well-documented inputs and appropriate training, inference, and feature infrastructure as products mature.
Establish governance that supports speed, including access controls, data classification, audit trails, PII handling, and practical data contracts.
Hire, develop, and lead a strong data engineering team, and establish operating rhythms across planning, on-call, and stakeholder intake.
Help define BuildOps' data strategy over the next three to five years and shape how the company builds data-powered products.