Director Data & Knowledge Management

At North Wind, we are advancing hypersonic technologies through cutting-edge research, system development, and flight testing. Our team drives innovation in high-speed aerodynamics, propulsion systems, and mission-critical components, supporting every phase of hypersonic programs - from R&D to flight testing. If you are passionate about pushing technological boundaries in a dynamic environment, we invite you to join us. We are seeking a highly skilled Director for Data & Knowledge Management to lead the architecture, development, integration, and operation of enterprise data and knowledge capabilities supporting Digital Engineering, AI/ML, Modeling & Simulation, advanced analytics, and mission-critical engineering applications. The successful candidate will establish and lead a multidisciplinary team responsible for transforming complex, distributed, and heterogeneous engineering and mission data into governed, discoverable, reusable, and AI-ready information and knowledge products. This role encompasses the complete data lifecyclefrom acquisition, ingestion, transformation, curation, and storage through metadata, provenance, semantic modeling, knowledge representation, analytics, and intelligent retrieval. The position requires a combination of technical depth, data science leadership, systems thinking, and organizational leadership. The Director will establish architectures and engineering practices that allow data and knowledge to be reliably used by engineers, analysts, data scientists, AI systems, and autonomous agents across on-premises, commercial cloud, government cloud, and regulated or classified environments. Responsibilities The Director for Data & Knowledge Management will lead the development and operation of enterprise data and knowledge capabilities supporting advanced engineering, artificial intelligence, modeling and simulation, analytics, and mission applications. This role serves as the team leader for data engineering, data science, knowledge engineering, metadata and provenance management, data governance, and information retrieval capabilities.The Director will build and manage teams responsible for acquiring, processing, curating, governing, and exposing data from engineering systems, test environments, simulations, sensors, enterprise applications, and other authoritative sources. The organization will establish reusable data pipelines and data products while preserving the context, lineage, relationships, uncertainty, and provenance necessary to transform raw information into trusted engineering and mission knowledge.The successful candidate will provide technical leadership for modern data architectures including lakehouse and data fabric patterns, distributed data processing, semantic models, ontologies, knowledge graphs, vector and graph databases, and AI-enabled knowledge retrieval. Particular emphasis will be placed on making enterprise data accessible to AI/ML and agentic systems through governed APIs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, knowledge graphs, and machine-readable context.The Director will also lead the application of data science and advanced analytics to extract information from complex datasets, identify relationships and patterns, develop predictive capabilities, and create reusable analytical methods and data products. The role requires the ability to bridge traditional data engineering with data science, knowledge representation, and emerging AI technologies.Working closely with infrastructure, cybersecurity, software, AI/ML, digital engineering, and mission teams, the Director will establish enterprise data standards, architecture patterns, governance mechanisms, and technical roadmaps while mentoring technical staff and developing a high-performing Data & Knowledge organization. Key Areas Of Responsibility Include Enterprise data and knowledge architectureData engineering, ingestion, transformation, and integrationData lakehouse, data fabric, and distributed data architecturesData science, advanced analytics, and algorithm developmentMetadata, provenance, lineage, and data lifecycle managementData quality, validation, curation, and authoritative-source managementOntology, taxonomy, and semantic model developmentKnowledge graphs and graph-based data architecturesVector databases, embeddings, and semantic retrievalRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and AI knowledge servicesData preparation and knowledge grounding for AI/ML and agentic systemsEngineering and mission data product developmentData governance, access policy, and stewardshipScientific, engineering, test, and simulation data managementData compression, optimization, and efficient information representationCross-domain data movement and distributed data managementTechnical leadership, team development, mentoring, and architecture governance Education Bachelor's degree in: Computer Science, Data Science, Physics, Mathematics, or other computational science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical fieldAdvanced technical degree preferred. Experience 10+ years of experience in one or more of: Data Science, Data Engineering, Knowledge Engineering, Advanced Analytics, Scientific Computing, Enterprise Data Architecture, AI/ML Engineering, Technical or Research & Development Leadership5+ years of experience leading technical teams, research teams, or multidisciplinary engineering organizations.Demonstrated experience developing data-driven solutions for complex scientific, engineering, national security, or mission applications.Experience working with large, complex, heterogeneous, or high-value datasets and developing methods for transforming those datasets into actionable information.Experience supporting regulated, government, national security, or classified environments preferred. Technical Skills The ideal candidate possesses broad expertise spanning data science, data engineering, knowledge management, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and enterprise-scale information architectures. They should demonstrate the ability to lead teams that transform raw and heterogeneous information into trusted, contextualized, and reusable data and knowledge products. Success in this role requires more than traditional database or data warehouse expertise. The candidate should understand how information moves from physical systems, experiments, simulations, enterprise applications, and other authoritative sources through processing and analytical pipelines and ultimately becomes knowledge that can support human decision-making, machine learning, and autonomous AI systems. The candidate should have experience solving complex data problems requiring analytical reasoning, algorithm development, computational methods, and collaboration across multidisciplinary technical teams. Key Technical Competencies Include Data science, statistical analysis, and advanced analyticsData engineering and scalable data processingData pipeline and workflow developmentData lakehouse, data fabric, and modern enterprise data architecturesStructured, semi-structured, unstructured, time-series, and scientific dataRelational, document, graph, vector, and distributed database technologiesMetadata management, provenance, lineage, and data catalogsData governance, stewardship, quality, and lifecycle managementOntologies, taxonomies, semantic models, and knowledge representationKnowledge graph architecture and graph analyticsMachine learning and AI-ready data engineeringEmbeddings, vector search, semantic search, and information retrievalRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecturesKnowledge grounding and context engineering for AI and agentic systemsAgentic data discovery, reasoning, and knowledge workflowsPython and modern data science/software development environmentsAPIs and programmatic data accessDistributed computing and high-performance data processingScientific and engineering data processingData compression, representation, and storage optimizationData visualization and communication of complex analytical resultsTechnical architecture, systems integration, and enterprise-scale solution design Preferred Qualifications Master's degree or Ph.D. in a relevant scientific, engineering, computational, or data disciplineActive Top Secret ClearanceExperience leading data science or advanced analytics teamsExperience supporting Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Intelligence Community, or other national security missionsExperience with scientific, experimental, sensor, or engineering datasetsExperience developing novel algorithms or intellectual propertyExperience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic technologies, or graph analyticsExperience with modern AI/ML architectures and generative AIExperience implementing RAG, semantic retrieval, or AI knowledge systemsExperience with data lakehouse and distributed data processing technologiesExperience integrating data across cloud, on-premises, and restricted environmentsExperience transitioning research concepts into operational capabilities Desired Characteristics Strong