{"id":1748066,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform","title":"Director, Data Engineering - Data & AI Platform","company":{"id":93035,"name":"Kapitus","domain":"kapitus.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kapitus","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":93,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.3,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":44,"computed_at":"2026-10-07T05:47:15Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Arlington, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":157100,"max":252000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":252000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Alteryx","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SSIS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"Git","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"SQL","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T20:37:50Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-08T01:11:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"Attention: Kapitus is aware that individuals posing as recruiters may be communicating with job seekers about supposed positions with Kapitus. Kapitus has received reports that the content and method of communication can vary, but messages may contain requests for payment (e.g., fees for equipment or training) and/or for sensitive financial information.\nKapitus will never ask a candidate for employment for payment or financial information during the initial application or interview process. All open positions are posted in location specific employment portals available at www.kapitus.com/careers All legitimate Kapitus job postings on employment sites will direct candidates to complete an application through these portals before completion of the hiring process.\nCandidates with additional questions or concerns regarding any recruiting communications or Kapitus’ recruiting process in general should email  \nKapitus is building a next-generation enterprise data and AI capability multi-year modernization program that replaces hundreds of legacy analytics workflows with governed, reusable business data products on a modern cloud data platform, stands up an AI/ML platform, and moves the organization from producing reports to producing decisions.\nWe are looking for a Director of Data Engineering to serve as the senior technical leader for this program: the person who owns how the platform is engineered. You will set the architecture and engineering standards for a Snowflake-centered data platform, lead internal and partner engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations, and stay hands-on enough to review a pull request, challenge a data model, and unblock a pipeline yourself. This is a player-coach role - you will spend real time in the code and the designs, not only in meetings.\nYou report directly to the program executive leading the Data & AI organization and serve as the technical delivery lead for the transformation program. You are the counterpart to the Technical Program Manager: the TPM owns the integrated plan, the gates, and the commercial controls; you own the architecture, the engineering quality, and the teams that build. Together you make sure what ships is well-built, evidenced, and accepted - not merely finished.\nWhat you will do:\nArchitecture and technical leadership\nOwn the engineering and solution architecture of the data platform within approved enterprise and data architecture standards including layered warehouse design, data modeling, ingestion and transformation patterns, orchestration, environment strategy, and promotion controls and keep delivery conformant to it.\nTranslate approved data architecture, MDM, ontology, semantic, and data-contract standards into enforceable engineering patterns so identity, meaning, metrics, and relationships remain consistent across products.\nSet and enforce engineering standards: repository structure, branching and CI/CD, code review, testing and data quality checks, naming and documentation, and performance and cost discipline.\nLead design reviews and architecture decision forums; document decisions, manage exceptions with owners and expiry dates, and prevent conformance debt from silently accumulating.\nDesign for reuse: shared ingestion frameworks, certified transformation patterns, common serving structures, and semantic consistency - so each delivery wave gets faster, not just bigger.\nStay technically hands-on: review critical code and designs, prototype or intervene on the highest-risk components when needed, tune warehouse performance and cost, and establish the engineering bar through direct technical engagement.\nEngineering delivery\nLead the engineering build of governed business data products end to end: source onboarding, ELT pipeline development, data modeling, quality controls, serving and consumption structures, and production release.\nDirect the migration and decommissioning of legacy analytics workflows onto the modern platform. Reuse, refactor, retire, or rebuild decisions grounded in analysis, not habit.\nOwn platform hardening and readiness: environments, security and access patterns, orchestration reliability, and operational readiness the platform is a product, not a project by-product.\nOwn engineering reliability for production data services including observability, service-level objectives, incident and problem management, recovery patterns, runbooks, and resilience/continuity requirements with recurring failures driven to root-cause closure.\nEngineer for the AI/ML workstream: feature-ready data, ML pipeline integration, and the data foundations that GenAI and agentic workloads depend on synchronized with platform readiness rather than bolted on.\nDeliver against the program’s milestone gates: vendor verification, business/customer validation, production acceptance. Code complete is not product complete your teams’ work is done when it is validated, evidenced, and accepted.\nTeam leadership - onshore and offshore\nLead and develop a blended engineering organization: internal engineers, partner delivery pods, and offshore teams across time zones.\nMake the onshore/offshore model actually work: clean handoffs, clear design specifications before build starts, overlap windows used deliberately, and quality standards that do not vary by location.\nUphold separation of duties between build and validation teams, and give validators what they need to verify work independently.\nAssess partner engineering quality directlyreview their designs and code, challenge estimates from technical knowledge, and hold delivery partners to the same standards as internal teams.\nHire, coach, and grow engineers; set clear expectations; and build a culture where problems surface early and evidence beats assertion.\nCross-functional partnership\nPartner with the Technical Program Manager on sequencing, capacity, dependency management, and gate readiness you own technical feasibility and quality; the TPM owns the integrated plan and commercial controls.\nWork with data governance so controls ship with the product: quality rules, lineage, classification handling, and catalog readiness built into pipelines rather than retrofitted.\nEngage business owners and architecture directly - explain technical trade-offs in business terms and drive timely technical decisions with accountable owners.\nWhat we’re looking for:\n10+ years of data engineering experience\n5+ years leading data engineering teams through enterprise data platform builds or modernizations. Backgrounds that combine engineering leadership with hands-on architecture such as a principal engineer, lead architect, consulting delivery lead, engineering manager are strongly valued; demonstrated technical depth matters more than title progression alone.\nDeep hands-on Snowflake expertise with warehouse and database design, performance tuning, cost and workload optimization, security and access patterns (roles, masking, row-level security), data sharing, and operational administration at production scale.\nHands-on dbt mastery including project architecture, layered modeling conventions, testing and documentation, macros and packages, CI/CD integration, and running dbt across multiple teams and environments while preventing uncontrolled project, model, and dependency sprawl.\nBroad modern data stack fluency with orchestration (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or similar), ingestion and CDC tooling, streaming and batch patterns, data catalogs and lineage, semantic/BI layers, and legacy workflow migration (e.g., Alteryx, SSIS, or similar). Databricks experience is a plus.\nStrong software engineering fundamentals must be an expert in SQL and have solid experience with Python, Git-based workflows, CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure-as-code awareness; you hold data engineering to software engineering standards.\nArchitecture credibility you have designed platforms, not just built on them: data modeling at enterprise scale, layered architectures, master\ndata and semantic consistency concerns, and the judgment to know when a pattern is worth standardizing.\nConsulting or professional services delivery background preferred. You have led client-facing engineering delivery under tight timelines, commercial constraints, and contractual milestone commitments, with experience estimating technical work and delivering to defined acceptance criteria (either side of the table: delivery firm or client organization).\nProven distributed team leadership experience leading onshore/offshore engineering teams, including partner and vendor pods, with quality and accountability consistent across locations.\nAI/ML platform literacy you must understand what ML and GenAI workloads demand of a data platform (feature pipelines, training and inference data flows, retrieval foundations, monitoring) well enough to engineer for them and to lead teams that do.\nStrong communication skills you can defend an architecture to engineers, explain a trade-off to executives, and write design documentation people actually use.\nAdditional Preferred Skills:\nExperience in financial services in lending, banking, fintech, or another regulated environment including working under data governance, model risk, and audit expectations.\nSnowPro certifications (Core, Advanced Architect, or Data Engineer), dbt certification, or cloud (AWS/Azure) certifications valued as evidence of rigor, not as a substitute for demonstrated delivery experience.\nExperience with data product operating models (data mesh / data product thinking, data contracts, certified metrics) and with building platforms that serve them.\nFinOps experience measuring and managing cloud data platform cost as an engineering discipline.\nExperience standing up engineering practices from scratch on a program: standards, CI/CD, review culture, validation streams, and operational readiness.\nKapitus Total Rewards Package Includes:\n· Competitive Base Salary Range of $157,100-$252,000 Kapitus is providing this as a good faith salary range to comply with applicable law. The applicant’s final salary will depend on a number of factors including the applicant’s geographic location, skills, and experience.\n· Annual Incentive Compensation Eligibility - Up to 15% annually\n Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical, dental, and employer-paid vision plans through UnitedHealthcare (UHC), with various coverage levels available to meet the needs of our employees and their families. Additional perks through UHC include: Sweat Equity, free subscription to the Calm App, UHC rewards, Real Appeal, and Quit For Life.\nFlexible Spending Account: Set aside pre-tax dollars from your paycheck to pay for qualified out-of-pocket medical, dental, vision, pharmacy or dependent care expenses. \nLifestyle Spending Account: Employer sponsored post-tax benefits that allow reimbursement for expenses related to physical, mental and financial well-being. \n100% Company Paid Insurances: Kapitus fully covers the cost of basic short-term and long-term disability insurance, as well as vision insurance, ensuring our employees have comprehensive protection without any personal expense.\nVoluntary Insurance: Supplemental life insurance as well as enhanced short- and long-term disability coverage are available through Mutual of Omaha, providing additional security for our employees. Additionally, Colonial Accident and Hospitalization insurances are also available, offering further protection against unforeseen events.\nPaid Maternity and Parental Leave: Beyond state-mandated leave policies, Kapitus provides company-paid maternity and parental leave, supporting our employees during important family milestones.\nCommuter Benefits: We offer pre-tax benefits on parking and commuter expenses to cover travel to and from work.\nLifeBalance Program: Enhance your lifestyle with our LifeBalance membership, which offers discounts on outdoor activities, the arts, health, and fitness. Additional benefits include: Pet and car insur...","description_format":"text","description_chars":14127,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Health insurance","Life insurance","Parental leave","Retirement plans","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-03T07:02:55Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":44,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-07T05:47:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":252000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-08T01:38:02Z","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","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2846,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2154,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-09T00:00:00Z"}},"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":93035},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=93035"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform"},{"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%2Fkapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform"},{"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%2Fkapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform"},{"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/kapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkapitus-director-data-engineering-data-ai-platform"}]}