VP, Head of Data

Cars Commerce

About The Position

Be essential at Cars Commerce At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry. No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challengeand Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable. But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more. The Role We are seeking a strategic and execution-oriented Head of Data to lead our enterprise data organization through its next stage of modernization and integration. Reporting to the CTO and partnering closely with the CEO and Executive Leadership Team, the Head of Data will unify Data Engineering, Data Science, Revenue Analytics, and Business Intelligence into a cohesive, high-performing organization. This leader will drive architectural stabilization, governance clarity, and improved decision velocity across the company. This is a transformation mandate grounded in pragmatic execution: stabilizing and rationalizing a fragmented data environment while delivering measurable business value along the way. The Head of Data serves as the executive integrator across data pillars, aligning technical architecture with business priorities.

Requirements

15+ years of progressive data leadership experience, with 5+ years at the VP/SVP level leading multidisciplinary organizations across data engineering, analytics, and data science
Demonstrated history influencing C-suite leaders and public company Boards to secure investment and deliver enterprise-scale data transformation initiatives
Architectural & Data Foundations
Strong foundational experience in database architecture, data engineering, or data platform design, with the ability to deeply understand data pipelines, schema design, and system-level data integrity
Demonstrated ability to steer and evaluate enterprise data platform decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and semantic modeling, prioritizing long-term architectural integrity over tool familiarity
Proven track record guiding teams toward trusted, high-integrity data pipelines and “single source of truth” environments
Technical Leadership vs Tool Expertise
Experience selecting and evolving data stack components based on business needs and scalability requirements, without being dependent on any single vendor ecosystem
Comfort engaging in detailed architectural reviews while maintaining executive-level perspective
AI & Intelligent Systems Literacy
Working understanding of the systems, data infrastructure, and experimentation frameworks required to enable scalable AI/ML initiatives
Experience supporting rapid model experimentation and productionization environments, without needing to serve as a hands-on modeler
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree (e.g., MS, MBA) is a plus but not required

Responsibilities

Enterprise Data Strategy Governance and Risk
Establish a trusted single source of truth for core enterprise metrics
Define and execute a multi-year enterprise data roadmap spanning engineering, analytics, and science
Align data capabilities to support marketplace growth, revenue expansion, and operational excellence
Accountable for defining and enforcing enterprise-wide standards for data definitions, metric integrity, and stewardship across all business functions
Own the identification and mitigation of enterprise data risks, including metric inconsistency, governance gaps, architectural fragility, and compliance exposure
Establish clarity across departments on trusted performance indicators
Data Architectural Stabilization and Modernization
Execute a multi-year modernization plan to democratize data consumption across the company with a high degree of confidence behind the metrics
Deliver meaningful business utility within the first 6 months while driving long-term architectural integrity
Rationalize a highly fragmented legacy data schema into scalable, domain-oriented models with clear sources of truth
Establish instrumentation and data contracts that enforce trust, and support near real-time experimentation and optimization
Establish engineering excellence standards that improve data reliability observability, and deployment rigor across the platform.
Establish architectural foundations capable of supporting event-driven intelligence and AI readiness
Revenue Acceleration & Decision Velocity
Drive the evolution from static reporting to near real-time, decision-ready intelligence across marketplace performance, revenue operations, and executive KPIs
Transition data from a reporting function to a revenue-driving capability by building trust around metrics and quality drivers that ensure accuracy
Improve time-to-insight for revenue, dealership performance, and marketplace KPIs
Enable reliable forecasting, pricing optimization, and experimentation frameworks
Advise the CEO and Executive Leadership Team on data-related capital allocation, technology investments, and risk tradeoffs, ensuring disciplined ROI and long-term platform sustainability
Organizational Leadership
Enable a “culture of acceleration” across the Cars Commerce business that increases velocity and impact over time through democratized, trusted data
Integrate and align multidisciplinary data functions under a unified operating model
Build an “accelerating organization” that increases delivery velocity and technical rigor over time
Serve as executive sponsor for data-related investment strategy, vendor partnerships, and cloud spend optimization
Recruit, develop, and retain top-tier data leadership talent
Data Science & Advanced Analytics
Oversee applied data science initiatives including predictive modeling, optimization, and experimentation
Ensure models integrate directly into product and revenue workflows
Balance long-term AI readiness with practical business impact
Governance & Trust
Establish pragmatic data governance and stewardship frameworks, working across the enterprise to ensure coordination with appropriate business, legal, information security and finance partners
Ensure data accuracy, availability, security, and compliance
Drive clarity on metric ownership and accountability across the enterprise