Head of Data, Platform and Intelligence
About The Position
As Head of Data, you will define and lead Babel Street’s North Star Data Strategy and Architecture, building a cohesive, scalable, and AI-native data platform that transforms fragmented systems into a unified foundation for intelligence, analytics, and product innovation. You will own the full lifecycle of data across the organization, from ingestion and storage to semantics, retrieval, and productization. Your mandate is to unify fragmented systems into a cohesive, scalable, and AI-ready data platform that directly enables investigative, analytical, and operational workflows across Babel Street’s product suite. You will work closely with Product and Engineering leadership, to ensure that data is not just infrastructure, but a core competitive advantage. This includes powering Babel Street’s Knowledge Graph, enabling agentic and generative AI systems, and delivering data capabilities that are reliable, performant, and economically efficient at scale. This role requires deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to translate complex data challenges into customer-impacting intelligence capabilities. This hybrid role will be based in their Reston, VA or Somerville, MA office.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in data platforms, data engineering, or distributed systems
- Strong background working within multi-cloud or hybrid environments, including hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale data platforms through major architectural transitions (e.g., warehouse, search, Lakehouse, or multi-cloud transformations)
- Deep expertise across multiple data paradigms, including: Analytical warehouses, Search/index systems, Object storage and distributed data systems
- Experience building platforms that support AI, ML, or agent-driven systems
- Familiarity with vector search, retrieval architectures, and modern AI data patterns
- Experience with graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graphs
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field required.
Nice To Haves
- Experience operating in regulated, high-stakes, or mission-critical environments is strongly preferred.
- Master’s degree or PhD preferred.
Responsibilities
- Define the North Star Data Architecture
- Establish and evolve the target-state data architecture, aligning storage, compute, search, and access patterns into a unified platform
- Drive architectural clarity across warehouse, search, object storage, and real-time systems
- Ensure consistency in schemas, metadata, and governance frameworks across all data domains
- Build an AI-Native Data Foundation
- Design a data platform optimized for AI and agentic workloads, including: API-first, agent-callable data services, Hybrid retrieval patterns (search + analytical + vector), Real-time and batch data unification
- Enable scalable support for LLMs, RAG pipelines, and intelligence workflows
- Own Data as a Product
- Establish a data-as-a-product operating model, enabling discoverable, reusable, and well-governed data assets
- Define and standardize data contracts, ownership models, and domain boundaries
- Translate platform capabilities into customer-facing data products and differentiators
- Lead Platform Rationalization and Evolution
- Rationalize and evolve the current ecosystem (e.g., BigQuery, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, S3) into a cohesive and cost-efficient architecture
- Lead phased, low-risk migrations and consolidations aligned to business priorities
- Balance short-term pragmatism with long-term architectural integrity
- Own Performance, Reliability, and Cost Economics
- Accountable for performance, scalability, and reliability of all data systems
- Establish clear unit economics for data (e.g., cost per query, cost per workload, storage efficiency)
- Implement strong observability, SLOs, and incident management practices
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
