Sr. Director, Analytics Technical Platform

Come build the next-gen fintech at Early Warning, network operator of Zelle®, where we're relentlessly focused on empowering prosperity in all its forms.

From fast money movement for over 100 million people who can access Zelle® directly through their banking app to new account opening and beyond - we make a difference in the lives of consumers and businesses every day and enable them to live their best financial lives. And we're only getting started.

With new state-of the-art offices in Scottsdale, AZ (Headquarters) and Chicago, IL - plus a growing presence in San Francisco - we're entering our next big chapter. We focus all hiring efforts in a few states and within driving distance of an office location to enable in-person collaboration when and where possible. Priority hiring locations are Scottsdale, AZ, Illinois, NY tri-state metro area (New Jersey, New York and Connecticut) and San Francisco, CA. On exception we will hire in secondary locations such as District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. We are not actively recruiting in Colorado, Rhode Island or Washington.

People matter to us, so we think our best work is done when we're together, in-person. From informal interactions, to sharing ideas, to mentoring and beyond. We also believe in workplace flexibility and empowering teams to determine the rhythm of work to create an inclusive culture. Through the power of innovative collaboration, we offer hybrid and (when necessary) virtual ("remote") workplace models.

Join us and make your mark on what's next in fintech.

*Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the United States. We are unable to sponsor an employment Visa for this position.

Overall Purpose

The Sr Director, Analytics Technical Platform is part of the Data Platform group within the Technology organization. This role leads the technical team that will build and support the analytics data environment used by the Chief Data Officer (CDO) group to support their business goals for Business Intelligence, Data Science, and Analytics. Working with stakeholders, technology partners, and enterprise architecture, determine the strategy for the platform across on prem and cloud infrastructure. Provide updates to executives and stakeholders on the progress and performance of the platform and future plans. This role will be a peer to the Production Data Platform team that owns the data environment that supports our production applications. This role will report to the Head of Data Platform Engineering on the Chief Technology Officer team.

Essential Functions

• Lead, grow and inspire an innovative yet process-driven technical data organization ensuring they are successfully executing projects driven by stakeholder requirements. Provide transparency, accountability, and ownership to members within the team to inspire long term team growth and improved outcomes.
• Effectively partner with a variety of cross-functional teams to determine the capability requirements for a scalable business intelligence, data science and analytics foundational infrastructure including data processing and storage
• Research and document non-business technical requirements for the platform to ensure the longevity of the system designs, optimize for current and future internal technical capabilities, account for industry evolution and best practices, and alignment with enterprise architecture vision and roadmap
• Establish and communicate data pipeline procedures including data formatting and ETL by stages; retention, expiration, and governance as dictated by business controls; data ingest best practices based on processing need (e.g. graph, in-memory, Parquet, time series, etc.); and optimize hybrid data model performance (such as graph + time series)
• Articulate the vision, roadmap and technical designs including proposed vendors, technologies, and technical processes to support those capability and technical requirements. Effectively brief executives and other stakeholders, accepting input and adjusting accordingly.
• Align with peers who own the production data platform (separate environment from the analytics data platform) to ensure reliable data movement, optimum platform integration, and coordination of data and technical planned updates.
• Translate the roadmap into projects with discrete milestones and reliable estimates on an annual basis.
• Deliver on those projects to build and extend in the future the highest quality platform that meets reliability, scalability, data governance, securability, auditability, (and other -ilities) requirements with financial oversight and proven ROI.
• Establish operational controls for uptime and business SLAs including observability metrics for proactive platform health monitoring; and appropriate support/on-call procedures for supporting constituencies.
• Establish and maintain industry standard best practices and processes through all phases of the development lifecycle.
• Lead or collaborate on end-to-end engagements with external vendors and partners including selection and ongoing relationship management to ensure we are getting high value out of our technology investments
• Support the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data. Ensure inclusion of strong data governance, risk, security, and data quality controls.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through completion of a bachelor's degree in a STEM or related field
• 15+ years' experience in Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, Data Architecture, or similar functions, with progressively increasing responsibility
• 10+ years of experience building and leading high performing technical data platform teams (including ETL, pipelines, and storage) providing critical business capabilities supporting analytics team
• 5+ years of experience building and directly managing high performing data teams
• Demonstrated experience in setting and delivering on a large-scale data or analytics-related technical strategy, developing requirements and roadmap while meeting budget and timeline targets.
• Hands-on experience building scalable data platform to meet business analysis and data science requirements.
• Expertise with graph analytics as it pertains to financial services: entity resolution; graph calculations/ML feature engineering (centrality, clustering, community detection, etc.); path analysis for specific use cases (shortest path, blast radius, user behavior analytics, etc.).
• Demonstrate executive presence, with ability to immediately establish credibility with executives and additional stakeholders.
• Experience with on-prem and cloud infrastructure, in both isolated and hybrid configuration, and understanding the implications of using those technologies and how to manage future evolutions
• Background and drug screen.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree
• Hands-on experience with machine learning and data science model deployment
• Experience leading software development in product organization and following best practice SDLC
• Strong understanding of data management requirements in financial services, or other regulated industry
• Direct experience working with large vendors (such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle)
• Direct experience building a vendor selection and adoption strategy (key issues, vendors, partners and best practices)
• Experience with: Salesforce, Google Analytics, SQL Server, Hive, Spark, SQL, and data architecture tools such as HDFS, Aerospike, ElasticSearch, Kafka
• Deep understanding of best practices and unique data and analytics requirements across functional areas such Product, Marketing, Data Science, Finance, Operations
• Practical experience with available graph technologies such as: Graph OLTP engines (e.g. Neo4j, TigerGraph, AWS Neptune, etc.); Graph OLTP processors (e.g. Boost, etc.)

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor.

Physical Requirements

Working conditions consist of a physical and virtual hybrid office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

• Healthcare Coverage - Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.

• 401(k) Retirement Plan - Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.

• Paid Time Off - Unlimited Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.

• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave

• Maven Family Planning - provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Early Warning Services is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants and employees will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, sex, pregnancy, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, citizenship, ancestry, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other characteristic protected by law.