Senior Vice President, Data Operations

Job Title

Job Description

About The Position | Major goals and objectives and location requirements

We are seeking a Senior Vice President of Data Operations to lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of our enterprise-wide data infrastructure. As a data-first media company operating at petabyte scale, data is the connective tissue across our editorial, product, advertising, and audience development functions. This is a defining leadership role for someone who can operate at the intersection of deep technical excellence and enterprise strategy - architecting the systems that power how we understand our content, our audiences, and our business.

The SVP of Data Operations will own the full data stack: from ingestion pipelines and data warehousing to real-time streaming, ML/AI platform capabilities, and the governance frameworks that ensure our data is trusted, accessible, and compliant.

Hybrid 3x a week- (New York, NY)

In-office Expectations: This position is hybrid in-office, with the ability to work remotely for up to 2 days per week.

About The Team

People Inc. is a leading digital media company reaching millions of consumers across a diverse portfolio of iconic brands. Our content informs, entertains, and shapes culture and increasingly, data, at multi-petabyte scale, is the engine behind how we create, distribute, and monetize that content. Operating in a real-time, multi-platform ecosystem, we rely on data to understand audience behavior, optimize content performance, power advertising solutions, and unlock new revenue streams. The SVP of Data Platformwill build and lead a high-performing team, partnering closely with Engineering, Data Science, Ad Tech, Research, Product, Editorial, Revenue, Business, and Marketing leadership, serving as the company's foremost authority on all things data.

About The Positions Contributions:

Strategy & Vision

• Define and execute a multi-year data platform strategy, aligned to company-wide goals across content, audience, advertising, and product.

• Serve as the executive voice of data - advising the CTO and C-suite on data architecture decisions, investments, and organizational structure, influencing how the company measures success.

• Translate complex data capabilities into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders.

• Establish a data-first culture across the organization, advocating for data literacy, democratization, and responsible use.

• Lead exploration and strategy around the foundational data products required to support use in both internal and external AI applications

Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Architect and oversee a petabyte-scale data platform spanning batch and real-time ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers.

• Drive the evolution of our data warehouse/lakehouse strategy (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, DBT) and ensure the platform is built for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale.

• Lead adoption of emerging data and AI technologies.

• Ensure the platform is designed for both technical and self-serve users, enabling analysts, data scientists, and product, and all other teams which use data to move quickly and independently.

• Own data pipeline architecture across streaming (e.g., Kafka, Pub/Sub) and batch frameworks, ensuring low-latency data delivery at scale.

Data Governance, Quality & Compliance

• Establish enterprise data governance standards including ownership, lineage, cataloging, and data quality SLAs.

• Define and enforce data privacy and compliance frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, and evolving state regulations), working in close partnership with Privacy, Legal, and Security.

• Build a trusted data foundation - ensuring every downstream team operates from a single, authoritative source of truth.

Team Leadership & Organizational Development

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing data organization including Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Analytics Engineering functions.

• Recruit and develop senior technical talent; build a team culture defined by ownership, craft, and continuous learning.

• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Data Science leadership to align roadmaps and ensure data capabilities are tightly coupled to company priorities.

• Define team structures, operating models, and performance metrics that scale with business growth.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement

• Drive the company's data infrastructure readiness for generative AI and ML applications - including model training pipelines, embedding stores, and experiment tracking.

• Partner with Product and Editorial teams to identify opportunities where advanced analytics and AI can create measurable impact.

The Role’s Minimum Qualifications and Job Requirements:

• Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field is required; a Master's or PhD is a plus.

• Experience:

  • 15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or analytics infrastructure.

  • At least 5 years of experience in a senior leadership role.

  • Proven track record designing and scaling petabyte-level data platforms in a high-traffic, data-intensive industry (preferably media, e-commerce, fintech, or similar).

Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications and Abilities:

• Deep expertise across the modern data stack: data lakes/lakehouses, cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Dataflow), and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster).

• Strong command of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and experience managing large-scale distributed systems at production quality.

• Experience establishing data governance programs, metadata management, and data quality frameworks at enterprise scale.

• Strategic mindset: comfortable defining a 3-year roadmap and equally comfortable making pragmatic architectural trade-offs in the near term.

• Exceptional communication and executive presence-ability to speak fluently with engineers and senior management alike.

• Experience in digital media, content platforms, or advertising technology is strongly preferred.

Why Join Us?

• Own and directly impact the data foundation of one of the largest digital media companies in the world - at petabyte scale, with real business impact.
• Partner with a technically sophisticated leadership team that views data as a first-class strategic asset.
• Shape how AI and advanced analytics transform the future of media, content, and audience intelligence.
• Lead a talented, mission-driven data organization with the resources and mandate to build something exceptional.
• Be part of a people-first culture with a strong commitment to craft, innovation, and continuous growth.

It is the policy of People Inc.to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.Accommodation requests can be made by emailing[email protected].

The Company participates in the federal E-Verify program to confirm the identity and employment authorization of all newly hired employees. For further information about the E-Verify program, please click here:https://www.e-verify.gov/employees

Pay Range

The pay range above represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position and may change in the future. Actual pay may vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to work location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of People Inc's total compensation package for employees. Other compensation may include annual bonuses, and short- and long-term incentives.In addition, PeopleInc.provides to employees (and their eligible family members) a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, unlimited paid time off (PTO), adoption or surrogate assistance, donation matching, tuition reimbursement, basic life insurance, basic accidental death & dismemberment, supplemental life insurance, supplemental accident insurance, commuter benefits, short term and long term disability, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family care benefits, a generous 401K savings plan with a company match program, 10-12 paid holidays annually, and generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents), all of which may vary depending on the specific nature of your employment with People Inc. and your work location. We also offer voluntary benefits such as pet insurance, accident, critical and hospital indemnity health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance.