{"id":1486330,"url":"https://alion.io/job/complex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2","title":"Director, Platform Design & Intelligence","company":{"id":13417,"name":"Complex","domain":"complex.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/complex","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":91,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.154,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":120,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Los Angeles, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":165000,"max":185000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":185000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Airflow","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Prefect","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-08-12T15:25:54Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-08-12","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T18:56:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":430,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":429},"description":"Company And Culture\nComplex is the definitive platform for global youth culture and music lifestyle, seamlessly integrating cutting-edge content, commerce and live experiences with unparalleled scale. Through innovative content, Complex tells stories of music, streetwear and style, sports, art and beyond. Its content engages in a dynamic conversation with the audience, reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist of convergence culture. A powerful media juggernaut paired with a curated marketplace, Complex is redefining the way fans interact with their favorite brands and artists and reshaping the future of digital culture and commerce.\nWhy We're Hiring\nWe’re looking for a hands-on technical leader who loves systems design and is deeply curious about our audience. You’ll co-design and implement Complex’s platform, AI, and agentic infrastructure with both leaders and technical colleagues, building secure systems, proprietary tools, and better audience experiences.\nYou’ll exercise architectural decision-making authority with both leaders’ advice and consent, especially in continuous improvement, refinement, and optimization. We believe software is the new media: bring design thinking to our content and audience systems, building for durability and adaptability.\nThis position will be on-site in our New York, NY or Los Angeles, CA office.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign a coherent platform\nCo-design the platform architecture and roadmap with both leaders and drive implementation with the team. Deepen our structured data lake and build reliable pipelines, warehouse models, and reusable services with SQL, Python, Snowflake, and AWS.\n\nRecommend what to build, buy, integrate, or retire. Implement agreed changes that remove unnecessary middleware, redundant licenses, and single-purpose tools.\n\nDevelop and implement standards with engineering colleagues for data quality, testing, lineage, observability, and deployment. Improve performance, cloud costs, resilience, and recovery together.\n\nTurn audience understanding into better experiences\nWork with data scientists and data engineers to understand our audience and help develop and implement segmentation across teams.\n\nDesign the signal capture that connects audience interactions to useful data. Make that data accessible and trustworthy for analytics, experimentation, content strategy, and product decisions.\n\nPartner with content, product, and engineering teams on proprietary tools and new audience interactions, with a clear place in the broader platform.\n\nPut AI to work responsibly\nBuild the data foundations for machine learning and generative AI, including training and inference pipelines, embeddings, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation where appropriate.\n\nTest new models and tools, evaluate results, and recommend priorities to both leaders. Implement agreed AI and agentic applications with the team, including evaluation and monitoring.\n\nWork closely with development, security, and applied AI colleagues to protect personally identifiable information and implement appropriate access controls. Make responsible design part of how the team builds and iterates.\n\nLead by building and teaching\nStay hands-on in implementation and architectural refinement while mentoring engineers. Support hiring and development, and help establish practices for code quality, version control, CI/CD, and operational reliability.\n\nHelp teams adopt the tools you build. Explain technical choices clearly, teach colleagues how systems work, and connect their use to content strategy and everyday decisions.\n\nTranslate business needs into implementation priorities with both leaders and cross-functional partners. Clarify responsibilities and tradeoffs, coordinate delivery, and measure results against agreed outcomes.\n\nWho You Are\n8+ years in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related discipline, including 3+ years leading teams, technical initiatives, or data platform architecture.\n5+ years each with SQL and Python, including complex data exploration, optimization, warehouse modeling, and production data or automation workflows.\n3+ years each with Snowflake; AWS services such as S3, EC2, and Lambda; and Apache Airflow or comparable orchestration tools such as Dagster or Prefect.\nExperience building scalable production data platforms and pipelines, with strong data quality, testing, observability, and operational practices.\nExperience supporting machine learning or AI through data engineering or infrastructure; an understanding of statistical analysis, experimentation, and data science workflows; and working knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, vector search, RAG, and AI application architecture.\nStrong systems design and problem-solving skills. You can explain technical decisions to engineers and non-technical colleagues, work effectively with executives and cross-functional teams, and help others put new tools into practice.\nCuriosity about our audience, sound judgment around security and data use, and a willingness to keep learning as models and tools change. \nYou must be willing to work on-site in our New York or Los Angeles office.\nAdditional Experience We Value:\nLeading AI transformation or platform initiatives; building production LLM applications and AI-powered automation; and evaluating models, retrieval systems, and AI performance.\nInfrastructure as code such as Terraform; CI/CD, Docker, or Kubernetes; distributed processing such as Spark; and data governance, metadata, lineage, security, and privacy.\nDigital media, advertising, publishing, entertainment, or consumer technology; high-growth or resource-constrained teams; and evaluating third-party platforms and build-versus-buy decisions.\nWhat We Offer\nBest in class health, dental, and vision insurance\nHealthcare FSA \nDependent Care FSA \nCommuter Benefits FSA \nShort-term/long-term disability and life insurance\nPaid Parental leave\n401k with 4% match\nPet Insurance\nLegal and Identity Theft Plans\nFlexible PTO","description_format":"text","description_chars":6004,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Life insurance","Parental leave","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Digital Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T23:25:10Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.405,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":429,"expected_fill_days":120,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":185000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/complex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/complex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T21:20:17Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2254,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":13417},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=13417"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcomplex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcomplex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcomplex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/complex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcomplex-director-data-engineering-ai-data-platforms-2"}]}