Lead Data Engineer, Ad Sales & Finance

Versant Media is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to support distributed delivery of trusted, scalable data products from source ingestion through the Silver layer. The role emphasizes engineering leadership, end-to-end pipeline ownership, and data quality, governance, and operating model practices to enable downstream analytics, reporting, AI, and operational use.

Location

New York, NY (onsite)

Compensation

USD 170,000 - 190,000 per yearly

Experience

8+ years

Role Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a distributed/offshore team of Data Engineers delivering from source ingestion through curated Silver-layer data products.
• Convert product roadmaps and requirements into engineering plans, including milestones, estimates, dependencies, and delivery commitments.
• Design and oversee ingestion, standardized transformations, orchestration, and publication of data from operational, SaaS, file, streaming, API, and partner sources.
• Ensure Silver-layer products are validated, standardized, documented, reusable, performant, secure, and ready for Gold-layer analytics and AI consumption.
• Establish repeatable processing patterns for batch, incremental, change-data-capture, and event-driven workflows.
• Build reusable engineering frameworks, templates, libraries, and pipeline patterns that reduce repeated effort across products and domains.
• Apply modern engineering practices, including source control, peer review, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, release management, and incident remediation.
• Define and maintain standards for naming, partitioning, schema evolution, error handling, replay/recovery, performance, cost management, and documentation.
• Partner with the Data Platform team to align with approved patterns for workspace, compute, storage, security, and deployment.
• Identify technical debt and lead pragmatic improvements that increase delivery speed, reliability, and maintainability.
• Work with Data Modelers to implement canonical entities, conformed dimensions, data contracts, source-to-target mappings, and enterprise modeling standards.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and domain leaders to clarify intended outcomes, source-system realities, priority use cases, and acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate dependencies with source-system owners, platform teams, analytics teams, and external partners.
• Set up data profiling, reconciliation, quality testing, freshness monitoring, lineage, and alerting for each delivered data product.
• Ensure source-to-Silver traceability, including authoritative source identification, transformation logic, ownership, metadata, and data-quality expectations.
• Implement access controls and sensitive-data practices, including classification, masking, retention, and regional/data-residency requirements.
• Drive resolution of data defects, schema changes, pipeline failures, and quality issues through clear ownership and service-level expectations.
• Establish team priorities, technical direction, delivery expectations, and quality standards.
• Coach engineers in data engineering, cloud development, testing, and observability, with product-oriented delivery practices.
• Create and maintain an onshore/offshore delivery model with defined handoffs, overlap hours, documentation standards, ceremonies, and escalation paths.
• Communicate delivery progress, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions to technical and business stakeholders.
• Build a culture focused on ownership, continuous improvement, and reliable execution.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering, software engineering, or data-platform experience, including 2+ years leading engineers, technical workstreams, or large-scale delivery.
• Proven experience designing and delivering enterprise-scale ingestion and transformation pipelines.
• Strong hands-on expertise in SQL, Python, Spark/PySpark, and modern ELT/ETL patterns.
• Experience with Databricks, Delta Lake, or a comparable lakehouse platform, plus experience with cloud storage, orchestration, and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of Bronze/Silver/Gold (or equivalent layered data-platform) patterns.
• Experience implementing production practices for data quality, observability, lineage, metadata, and support.
• Ability to partner with architects, data modelers, product leaders, and domain stakeholders.
• Experience leading distributed teams and building delivery practices across time zones.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical choices, risks, and tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with Unity Catalog or comparable governance, catalog, and access-control capabilities.
• Experience with data contracts, schema evolution, change data capture, APIs, event streaming, and large-volume data processing.
• Experience supporting multiple data domains, global data products, or regional/data-residency requirements.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, DataOps, and automated environment provisioning.
• Experience supporting a regulated, high-scale, or operationally sensitive environment.

Technologies

• SQL, Python
• Spark, PySpark
• ELT/ETL
• Databricks, Delta Lake
• CI/CD
• Bronze/Silver/Gold
• Unity Catalog
• APIs, event streaming
• Infrastructure-as-code, DataOps

Additional Information

• External candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a Versant Media employee at one of its locations prior to a hiring decision.
• Versant Media provides equal employment opportunities regardless of protected status under applicable law.
• Reasonable accommodation is available for qualified individuals with disabilities or disabled veterans during the application and/or recruitment process. Submit requests to [email protected].
• Versant Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices and shares a good faith pay range; actual compensation is based on skills, qualifications, experience, and location, and may include additional compensation and benefits.
• Versant Media does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms. Resumes submitted without a valid written Statement of Work will be treated as the sole property of Versant, and no fee will be paid if the candidate is hired.