Director, Staff Data Engineer

dentsu•New York, NY

11d•$113,000 - $160,000

About The Position

The purpose of this role is to provide technical guidance and suggest improvements in data analytics and governance processes. It is responsible for overseeing data engineering activities and aiding in building the business’ data collection systems and processing pipelines; building and maintaining optimised and highly available data pipelines that facilitate deeper analysis and reporting. Job Description: Role Summary We are seeking a Director, Staff Data Engineer to serve as the senior hands‑on engineer within the Data Architecture & Solutions pillar. In this role, you will translate the VP’s architecture strategy into working, scalable infrastructure. You will design systems, write production‑ready code, review architecture, and uphold engineering standards across onshore and offshore teams. You will take ownership of the most complex builds, solve deep technical challenges, and set the code quality bar for the team.

Requirements

8+ years of data engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical leadership or staff‑level role.
Expert‑level experience with Databricks (Unity Catalog, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines, serverless compute), PySpark, and enterprise lakehouse architecture.
Strong experience with Azure cloud infrastructure, including ADLS, ADF, Azure DevOps, and Azure networking.
Advanced PySpark and Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines skills with experience building and maintaining large‑scale data transformation pipelines.
Strong data architecture knowledge across multiple modeling approaches (e.g., dimensional, data vault, medallion).
Demonstrated ability to define engineering standards and drive adoption across teams.
Experience with data governance, security, and compliance in multi‑tenant environments.
Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical decisions to leadership audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience scaling a single‑client data stack into an enterprise multi‑client deployment model.
Background in media, advertising, or marketing technology environments.
Experience with Lakeflow Connect managed ingestion connectors and enterprise data mesh patterns.
Experience managing Power BI at scale (Premium capacity, deployment pipelines, semantic models).
Experience mentoring or managing offshore engineering teams.
Familiarity with Adverity, Lakeflow Connect, or similar media data integration platforms.

Responsibilities

Architect and build complex components of dentsu’s enterprise data platform across Azure, Databricks, PySpark, Lakeflow, and Power BI.
Lead the development of multi‑client Databricks environments, cross‑agency data federation solutions, and Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines using serverless compute.
Drive adoption of engineering standards, coding practices, and architectural patterns defined by the VP, ensuring consistency across all delivery teams.
Build and optimize Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines (formerly DLT) and Lakeflow Connect ingestion pipelines to support Programmatic and Search data at scale.
Design and implement data governance frameworks including Unity Catalog policies, attribute‑based access control (ABAC), data lineage, and tag‑driven security.
Lead technical hiring assessments and onboarding for new Data Engineering talent.
Mentor and develop Senior Data Engineers and Data Engineers across onshore and offshore teams.
Collaborate with the Director, Staff AI Engineer on shared infrastructure to support agentic workloads.
Manage technical debt, platform migrations, and modernization efforts across client environments.
Serve as the first escalation point for complex data engineering challenges before they reach the VP.