Senior Director, Data Engineering

Autodesk•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Sitting in our Growth Experience Technology organization which supports our GTM/Business Systems and .com technology, we are seeking a Senior Director, Data Engineering to lead Autodesk’s end-to-end data engineering strategy across batch and real-time platforms. This role is accountable for defining how data is adopted and operationalized at enterprise scale to drive measurable business outcomes, not just technical availability. This leader will own Autodesk’s GTM data foundations, including warehouse, Batch, and real-time processing by partnering with Platform & Architecture teams, and ensure they enable reliable decision-making, AI-driven use cases, and cost-efficient operations across Finance, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Digital teams(.com). Success in this role is measured by active business adoption, improved decision velocity, and sustained value creation from data investments. The role partners closely with the Platform Services and Emerging Technologies (PSET) Infrastructure organization to ensure data engineering solutions are built on secure, scalable, and resilient platforms, while establishing clear governance standards, common data models, and shared metrics that influence how teams across Autodesk build and use data. As a senior leader, you will guide a global organization to deliver AI-ready data solutions, shape company-wide data practices, and prioritize investments based on business impact, cost discipline, and long-term scalability. This role requires strong cross-functional leadership, executive-level communication, and a mindset focused on continuously optimizing the value of Autodesk’s data and AI ecosystem. This role works with teammates across the globe and includes up to 25% travel for in-person collaboration, conferences, and team offsites. The role is preferred hybrid to our San Francisco office; candidates based outside San Francisco should expect increased travel.

Requirements

15+ years of data engineering leadership, including 8+ years managing large, multi-team organizations
Proven expertise in real-time data platforms such as Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalents
Extensive experience with lakehouse and warehouse platforms, including Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, and large-scale Spark, Flink, and streaming technologies
Hands-on experience with modern data lake formats like Apache Iceberg
Strong knowledge of Master Data Management (MDM) principles and tools
Designed and operated enterprise data models optimized for BI and visualization, including star/snowflake schemas and semantic layers
Demonstrated track record in governance, lineage, compliance, and cost optimization
Exceptional executive communication and influencing skills, with experience driving alignment across complex organizations

Nice To Haves

Delivered LLM/RAG/AI-powered systems using real-time event data
Designed domain-oriented data contracts and self-service frameworks
Built systems powering ecommerce personalization, marketing automation, sales analytics, or finance reconciliation
Familiar with CDC pipelines, schema registries, and eventing standards (CloudEvents, Avro, Protobuf)

Responsibilities

Own measurable adoption outcomes by ensuring data solutions are actively used to drive business decisions, including defined success metrics such as active users, decision velocity, revenue impact, and deprecation of low-value data assets
Lead enterprise data solutions and related AI enablement to deliver monetizable insights through automation, accuracy, and scale
Accountable for optimizing cost versus business value across data investments, ensuring spend is justified by measurable revenue impact, margin improvement, or operating efficiency—not platform utilization alone
Lead batch and real-time data engineering across Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, DBT, Nexla, BigQuery  for batch processing and Kafka, Flink, streaming frameworks for real-time processing.
Collaborate with PSET Infrastructure team to design reliable, scalable platforms while guiding your team to build robust data pipelines, models, and AI-ready data solution using PSET infrastructure
Evangelize data strategy and best practices across the COO & CFO organization to ensure adoption and alignment.
Implement and maintain a common data model to standardize definitions across Finance, Marketing, Sales, and Digital Properties (.com)
Ensure standardized metrics and semantic consistency to enable accurate reporting and BI performance
Define and execute data lake strategies using modern table formats (Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) to support scalability, schema evolution, and cost-efficient storage
Establish SLA/SLO tiers for batch and streaming data freshness, availability, and quality
Embed lineage, observability, privacy, and compliance into all data solutions
Implements AI-enabled analytics to improve insights and decision-making that accelerate digital transformation and cross-functional impact
Partner with Data Science and Product teams to enable AI/ML applications, including personalization, recommendation systems, fraud/risk detection, predictive analytics, and AI-driven workflows
Provide governed feature stores with consistent online/offline access and freshness guarantees
Build data pipelines that support finance-grade reconciliations and sales/marketing attribution
Lead a multi-level data engineering organization (senior managers/directors, senior ICs) with clear career growth, development, and succession planning
Define and deliver OKRs focused on adoption, reliability, cost efficiency, and compliance
Mentor senior leaders in data engineering, MDM, governance, and data modeling best practices
Partner closely with PSET Infrastructure, Product, Security, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Trust/Security, and Support to deliver measurable business outcomes

Benefits

From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work.
Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting https://benefits.autodesk.com/

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