Head of Data Infrastructure

Beacon Software•San Francisco, CA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Beacon Software acquires and operates vertical market SaaS companies across North America. We run a portfolio of 25+ software businesses spanning campground management, election platforms, field safety tools, proptech data, workforce scheduling, and more, with a shared focus on compounding customer value over the long term. Data sits at the centre of how we operate. We use it to run portfolio companies better, underwrite new acquisitions, and increasingly to build AI-powered capabilities into our products. This role is the person who architects, owns, and builds the infrastructure that makes all of that possible. We are looking for a senior data infrastructure leader who is still deeply hands-on. Someone who has spent time inside companies like Snowflake, Databricks, or Confluent building the platforms others run on, and who now wants to apply that depth to a genuinely interesting operational problem. You will be the first dedicated data infrastructure hire at the Beacon holding-company level. You will design the architecture, write significant amounts of the code, and set the patterns for how data flows across a growing portfolio. The problem is not generic. Multi-tenant isolation across very different portcos, cross-cloud ingestion from systems we do not control, regulated verticals with residency requirements, and a long-term path toward making this data usable by both people and software. Over time, you will define whether and how a small team gets built around you.

Requirements

Hands-on background in distributed systems, query engines, or cloud data platforms.
Comfortable writing production Python, SQL, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi).
Deep familiarity with modern lakehouse and warehouse internals (Iceberg, Delta, Parquet, Snowflake, Databricks).
Strong grasp of streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink) and CDC patterns.
Experience building for both analytical and operational workloads at scale.
Still gets excited to write code and review PRs.
Operates well in small-team, high-autonomy environments without heavyweight process.
Strong opinions, loosely held. Makes architectural decisions fast and iterates.
Can translate infrastructure complexity into plain language for operators and GMs.
Comfortable scoping work across many different business contexts simultaneously.

Nice To Haves

Spent time inside companies like Snowflake, Databricks, or Confluent building the platforms others run on.
Experience building AI feature stores, vector infrastructure, and low-latency serving layers.
Experience with build vs. buy decisions for data tooling.

Responsibilities

Design and build Beacon's lakehouse, warehouse, and pipeline architecture.
Unify data across 25+ portfolio companies into a coherent platform that survives contact with very different source systems, very different data quality, and very different portco maturity levels.
Connect diverse source systems (SaaS apps, transactional DBs, Stripe, Salesforce, custom APIs) into a low-latency data layer.
Define the data modeling standards, transformation logic (dbt, Spark, or equivalent), and lineage practices used by the entire portfolio.
Establish the processing framework for operational analytics, AI feature engineering, and executive reporting.
Implement per-portco data, compute, and credential boundaries.
Manage cross-cloud (AWS and Azure) connectivity and regional residency for portcos in regulated verticals.
Design and implement KMS scoping, IAM design, and audit surfaces.
Own the Terraform or Pulumi modules that other engineers build against for cloud provisioning, cost management, and observability.
Partner with AI and product teams to build feature stores, vector infrastructure, and low-latency serving layers.
Evaluate and own the cloud warehouse, orchestration, cataloging, and BI tooling.
Act as the senior technical voice in acquisition diligence, assessing target companies' data maturity and integration complexity.