VP of Data Engineering

MFour Mobile Research • Kansas City, MO

4d • $150,000 - $200,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Our data is the product. Every Studio insight, every licensed data feed and every AI agent answer depends on pipelines that run on time and data that is provably correct. You will own that end to end. You inherit a working platform — a verified mobile panel, behavioral app/web/location streams, a Databricks and Snowflake estate on AWS, and daily contractual feeds to data-licensing partners. Your job is to turn it into an operation that is measured, monitored, and on-call around the clock, and to build the team that runs it.

Requirements

• 12+ years in data engineering, including 5+ years leading data engineering teams, with managers reporting to you.
• Hands-on depth in Python and SQL, and production experience with Snowflake and/or Databricks (Spark) on AWS.
• A record of running pipelines under external SLAs — data sold or delivered to customers, not only internal dashboards.
• Built data-quality and observability programs: automated tests, lineage, alerting, and on-call.
• Shipped identity resolution or entity matching across devices, panels, or third-party datasets.
• Worked under U.S. privacy law (CCPA/CPRA) with hashed PII, consent, and retention controls.
• Owned a cloud data budget and cut costs without cutting reliability.
• Explains trade-offs plainly to executives and says no when the data is not ready.

Nice To Haves

• Market research, panel, ad-tech or data-licensing background; familiarity with survey fraud and sample quality.
• Mobile app, web-panel or location (SDK) data at scale.
• dbt, orchestration (Airflow, Databricks Workflows), and streaming.
• Data foundations for LLM products: retrieval, evaluation sets, grounding.
• Experience leading through a warehouse migration.

Responsibilities

• Own the Data Platform roadmap, architecture and budget across ingestion, storage, transformation and delivery.
• Lead warehouse and lakehouse decisions (Snowflake, Databricks) with explicit cost, performance and lock-in trade-offs.
• Design identity resolution that links panelists to their devices, app, web and location signals without compromising privacy.
• Set SLAs for every production pipeline and hold the team to them.
• Build observability: data-quality tests, lineage, freshness and volume alerts, paging for failures at any hour.
• Stand up and staff a 24/7 on-call rotation for the Data Platform, integrated with incident management.
• Publish data-quality and panel-health metrics that leadership, Sales and clients can rely on.
• Deliver licensed data feeds (app, web, media, shopper, audio, social ad exposure, demographic) on contractual daily SLAs.
• Supply clean, modeled data to MFour Studio, crosstabs and our AI agents, including retrieval and evaluation datasets.
• Onboard new third-party data sources, including location data, and prove their match quality before release.
• Enforce hashed-PII handling, retention and consent rules in the pipelines themselves, not in policy documents alone.
• Partner with Security on access control, audit logging and compliance with CCPA/CPRA and other U.S. state privacy laws.
• Hire, coach, and retain data engineers; set the bar for code review, testing and documentation.
• Work daily with Product, Engineering, Customer Success and Data Licensing; translate data risk into business terms for the executive team.

Benefits

• Salary: $150,000-200,000
• Top-tier health benefits include: medical, dental, vision, LTD, and life insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Fully equipped gym on-site (Depending on location)
• Open space concept & team-focused atmosphere
• Company-wide celebrations
• Team bonding events and happy hours

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed