Marketing Data Platforms Technical Leadership

About the role

This role provides senior technical leadership across marketing data platforms, including CDP, identity resolution, and data clean rooms—ensuring scalable, governed, and privacy-safe data foundations that power Marketing 360 (M360) and downstream activation. Importantly, this role is designed as a growth opportunity for high-potential engineers and technical leads and may evolve into a people-leader role within the same domain over time, based on business needs and individual readiness.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Ensures the viability of IT deliverables; recommends development options and approves the team's technical deliverables.
• Conducts testing, including functionality, technical limitations, and security.
• Identifies potential solutions and approves technical solutions proposed by team members.
• Elevates complex technical issues to IT experts and 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.
• 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.
• Maintains a current and working knowledge of IT development methodology, architecture design, and technical standards.
• Mentors IT staff and identifies training needs; ensures new standards are adopted by team members.
• Reviews and approves documentation and diagrams created by IT team members; writes documentation, including technical standards and processes.
• Identifies opportunities for continuous quality improvement of technical standards, methodologies, and technologies.
• Participates in design, code, and test inspections throughout the product life cycle to identify issues.
• Participates as a technical consultant at other project meetings; presents technical status and issues at milestone reviews.
• Thoroughly understands and complies with Information Technology and Information Security policies and procedures, verifying deliverables meet requirements.
• Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Demonstrated ability to coach, mentor, develop, and lead junior team members in effective use of technology and systems, providing technical guidance and design reviews.
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to collaborate effectively across Product, Engineering, and business teams.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve results while working in a cross-functional environment.

Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission—we're on a mission: to work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through products and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.