Director - Real-Time Data Services Engineering

Gap Inc.•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

The Director of Real-Time Data Services Engineering will design and execute strategies that enable the organization to harness streaming and event-driven data across the full fashion retail value chain — from browse and purchase signals to inventory movement and fulfillment events. This role reports into the Sr. Directors, Data Platform Engineering and owns the enterprise real-time data backbone, delivering low-latency, high-availability data services that power personalization, demand sensing, omnichannel operations, and live customer experiences. This leader will work in close partnership with merchandising technology, digital product, supply chain engineering, and marketing data teams to ensure the right data reaches the right systems at the speed the business demands.

Requirements

Significant relevant experience in data engineering or platform engineering, with meaningful concentration in real-time or streaming data infrastructure
Strong experience delivering real-time data solutions in fashion, apparel, or specialty retail environments — including seasonal demand patterns, size/color complexity, and omnichannel fulfillment
Deep expertise in stream processing technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalent
Hands-on experience building and operation Operational Data Stores (ODS) and other data product serving mechanisms
Hands-on experience with change data capture (CDC), event-driven microservices, and operational data stores supporting high-frequency retail transactions
Experience operationalizing data quality, pipeline observability, and SLA enforcement for streaming workloads in production
Strong background in cloud-native data stacks (Azure, GCP, or AWS) with focus on real-time consumption patterns including event hubs, pub/sub systems, and live data APIs
Experience integrating real-time data platforms with retail-specific systems including OMS, POS, WMS, CDP, and marketing activation platforms
Demonstrated ability to translate streaming infrastructure capabilities into tangible business outcomes — reduced markdowns, faster replenishment, improved conversion
Experience working across global teams spanning multiple geographies and time zones, including offshore engineering partners
Proven ability to operate with high independence in a fast-paced retail environment driven by seasonal calendars, peak trade periods, and rapidly shifting executive priorities
Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to make complex streaming architecture decisions accessible to merchandising, marketing, and finance stakeholders
Retail experience is required; fashion or apparel retail strongly preferred

Responsibilities

Own and drive the real-time data services roadmap aligned to key fashion retail business priorities — including live inventory visibility, real-time personalization, and omnichannel order orchestration
Implement active stewardship of streaming data assets including schema registries, event topic governance, data lineage, and end-to-end pipeline observability
Partner with merchandising technology and supply chain teams to replace latency-heavy batch processes with streaming solutions that enable faster markdown decisions, smarter replenishment, and live size-curve analytics
Collaborate with digital product and marketing teams to deliver real-time customer behavioral signals that power personalization engines, triggered communications, and live site experiences
Own the reliability, throughput, and quality of core real-time data streams with measurable improvements each sprint
Lead enterprise alignment on streaming data standards, event schema contracts, and API-first data delivery patterns across brands and banners
Drive investment strategy for streaming infrastructure and real-time BI, including architecture decisions that support peak retail periods such as holiday, back-to-school, and new collection launches
Serve as the internal real-time data evangelist — proactively identifying high-value opportunities to move the business from next-day insight to in-the-moment action
Enforce data security, access governance, and privacy compliance as applied to streaming and event data, in partnership with legal and data governance teams
Represent real-time data platform needs in technology evaluations, vendor partnerships, and any acquisition or brand integration activities
Build, develop, and retain a high-performing platform engineering team through effective hiring, coaching, technical mentorship, and clear career pathing