Director of Data Platform Engineering

Be the one who makes a difference!

At Vertex Education we are a team of high achievers, courageous leaders, and passionate believers in changing lives through education. As a purpose-led education services provider, our mission is destined to benefit many and yet it starts with just one person inspired to work together with us to make a memorable and meaningful difference for our clients, schools, students, and communities.  Be the one who makes a difference—with us.  

Vertex Education is hiring a Director of Data Platform and Engineering to build and operate the data foundation that powers the company. You will turn our data work from reactive and inconsistent into a reliable, certified platform the whole company trusts, and you will run our internal data team and our engineering vendor to real delivery standards. This is a hands-on builder's role for a leader who is disciplined about scope: you own the platform and the engineering, and you partner closely with the analytics and governance functions rather than absorbing their work. If you are energized by building a dependable data foundation and leading a team to ship it, this is your opportunity to build the backbone of a data-driven organization.

Responsibilities:

Build and operate the data platform:

• Build and maintain certified data models in dbt and operate the Snowflake warehouse for performance, availability, and cost.

• Design, build, and operate the ingestion pipelines that bring data into the warehouse, with monitoring, lineage, and automated data quality tests.

• Keep operational systems and the reporting platform isolated so they do not degrade each other.

• Architect the platform so data is reliable, well-structured, and reusable across reporting, analytics, and future data products.

• Deliver reusable, certified data sets and connection patterns that other teams build on instead of recreating.

Lead the team and the vendor:

• Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship to a developing data engineering team as a player-coach.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards: code review, version control, CI/CD, and disciplined delivery.

• Own the external engineering vendor relationship as the single Vertex-side technical owner, managing the vendor to a prioritized roadmap with clear accountability.

• Define roles, lead hiring, and onboard new engineers, including internal and external contributors.

Run platform operations:

• Own the platform budget, including cloud compute and vendor licensing, and enable cost separation between Vertex and client schools.

• Act as incident commander during critical pipeline failures, directing resolution and stakeholder communication.

• Ensure the platform meets FERPA and data privacy requirements through encryption, access controls, and audit support, partnering with security and legal who own enforcement.

Partner with the teams you serve:

• Serve the analytics function by delivering the certified, documented data sets they build reporting and analysis on, and by owning the source and model issues they escalate.

• Serve the governance function by implementing and maintaining the definitions and data quality standards the business approves and governance certifies.

• Work with source-system owners through data contracts that define how data flows and how changes are communicated.

Qualifications:

Required:

• Proven experience leading, mentoring, and hiring a team of data engineers, combining leadership with hands-on technical contribution (player-coach).

• Hands-on expertise with a modern data stack: a cloud data warehouse (Snowflake), transformation tooling (dbt), and ELT and ingestion services (Fivetran, Azure Data Factory).

• Demonstrated success building certified, well-documented, tested data models that downstream teams trust as a single source of truth.

• Strong engineering discipline: code review, version control, CI/CD, lineage, monitoring, and automated data quality testing.

• Experience managing an external engineering vendor or accelerator as the accountable technical owner.

• Experience owning a data platform budget, including cloud compute and vendor contracts, with cost allocation and optimization.

• Experience ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations such as FERPA when managing sensitive data.

Preferred:

• Experience integrating data from numerous disparate and legacy source systems.

• Familiarity with BI and visualization tools, particularly Tableau, as a consumer of platform data.

• Ability to translate technical platform decisions into clear recommendations for non-technical executives.

• Direct experience in or serving the education sector.

• Experience designing data platforms that can support advanced analytics or emerging data use cases.

Be excited to be a part of our team and grow your career with us!​

Be the one who enables us to positively impact over 258,000 students across multiple states while driving our growth forward so we can enrich even more lives. Be the one who helps us achieve excellence for over 226 schools that we support with academics, finance, technology, human resources, communications, marketing, facilities, construction, and food services. Be the one who is a diverse thinker, a team player, a smart risk taker, an innovator, and a difference maker by encouraging others to climb higher and reach farther to further education.

• Be yourself surrounded by wonderful people who care about you, value your unique skills, and lift you up.

• Be supported in your work by caring leaders and team members who want you to succeed.

• Be empowered to make a difference and climb higher and reach farther to change lives through education.

• Be well in all aspects of your life from your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing to your finances.

• Enjoy industry-leading pay, rewards, referral bonuses, with unlimited flexible paid time-off for performance.

• Be able to care for your health and your family with comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits and invest in your future with 401(k) plans with a 6% employer match on your contributions.

• Enhance your growth and development with mentoring and money to take training classes.

• Thrive in a welcoming, supportive, and inclusive environment where we treat others with fairness and respect, celebrate diversity, and elevate equality and inclusion as an equal opportunity employer.

Be the one who makes a difference!

With an innovative mind, a hungry heart, and engaging spirit you can change lives through education. Be a part of Vertex Education and let’s make a difference together. Apply Today!