Marketing Data Platforms Technical Leadership

Core Responsibilities:

1. Provides expert level IT technical lead services and direction for critical software, middleware, or hardware projects on multiple platforms. Provides technical expertise and completes complex development, design, implementation, architecture design specification, and maintenance activities.

2. Ensures the viability of IT deliverables. Recommends development options and approves the team's technical deliverables. Conducts testing, including functionality, technical limitations, and security.

3. Identifies potential solutions and approves technical solutions proposed by team members. Elevates complex technical issues to IT experts. Resolves technical problems discovered by testers and internal clients. . Responds to and resolves technical issues in a timely manner. Researches issues and performs root cause analysis. Anticipates technology problems and prevents them.

4. Communicates with key stakeholders on project issues and implications. Evaluates the impacts of change requests on technologies and effectively persuades and influences others on ideas.

5. Maintains a current and working knowledge of IT development methodology, architecture design, and technical standards. Mentors IT staff and identifies training needs. As new standards are instituted, ensures their usage by team members.

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience, with at least 3+ years of hands-on development experience building and operating data platforms or large-scale data pipelines.
• Some marketing data domain knowledge, including how customer interaction data is used for activation, personalization, measurement, and analytics across digital channels.
• Experience with Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Identity Resolution, customer profiles, and privacy-aware data collaboration patterns (e.g., clean rooms) preferred.
• Solid understanding of big data and streaming architectures used for segmentation, audience building, and real-time activation.
• Strong grounding in modern engineering practices, including DataOps, CloudOps, CI/CD, and automated testing; experience with tools such as Git, Maven, Cucumber, Bamboo/Jenkins, and similar pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native data platforms and patterns (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including serverless and distributed data processing.
• Proficiency in data engineering and analytics languages and frameworks, such as Python, SQL, Spark, Scala, and related ecosystems.
• Experience designing and building distributed, scalable, and resilient data pipelines, with a clear focus on data quality, observability, and reliability.
• Strong product mindset - able to translate business needs into durable, scalable engineering solutions rather than one-off implementations.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs and microservices for data access and activation, including RESTful services and cloud API management platforms (e.g., AWS API Gateway).
• Familiarity with data governance, security, and privacy-by-design principles, especially when working with customer and identity data.
• Willingness and enthusiasm for learning and experimenting with new technology, tools and processes and setting Vanguard-wide standards.
• Willingness and enthusiasm for experimenting with new tools and processes and setting Vanguard-wide standards.
• Demonstrated ability to coach, mentor, develop, and lead junior team members in the effective use of technology and system, providing technical guidance and design reviews, and helping engineers grow in system thinking and architecture skills,
• Strong interpersonal skills, ability to collaborate effectively across Product, Engineering, and business teams
• Demonstrated ability to achieve results while working in a cross-functional environment