Principal Consultant – Data Lead

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary data and technical point of contact for client leadership and key stakeholders.
• Build trusted client relationships and ensure strong satisfaction, retention, and value realization.
• Provide oversight across project scope, schedule, budget, risks, quality, and deliverables.
• Lead and mentor consultants, business analysts, developers, and other project team members.
• Facilitate executive and working-team discussions, resolve issues proactively, and align delivery with client objectives.
• Identify risks, dependencies, and decisions requiring client or project leadership attention.
• Translate technical delivery activities into clear business outcomes and executive-level communication.

Higher Education / Ascend CRM Leadership

• Bring strong knowledge of Higher Education Advancement data and CRM processes, preferably with direct Ascend CRM implementation or migration experience.
• Understand constituent, household, organization, gift, campaign, fund/designation, prospect, portfolio, and engagement data.
• Advise clients on data migration, conversion, reconciliation, integration, and data quality strategies associated with Ascend implementations.
• Partner with functional Advancement teams to translate business requirements into data and technical solutions.
• Understand the relationships between Advancement CRM, finance, identity, marketing, analytics, and other institutional systems.

SQL Development & Data Engineering

• The Data Lead must remain technically hands-on and capable of directly supporting development when needed.
• Write and troubleshoot complex SQL queries.
• Analyze large datasets to identify data quality, transformation, mapping, and reconciliation issues.
• Support source-to-target mapping and migration development.
• Perform data profiling and assist with cleansing, normalization, deduplication, and transformation rules.
• Support developers during complex migration and integration troubleshooting.

Data Strategy

• Serve as a bridge between executive leadership, business stakeholders, functional teams, and technical engineering/analytics teams.
• Translate organizational goals and business requirements into actionable data strategies and technical requirements.
• Develop current-state and future-state data architectures and roadmaps.
• Advisory clients on data platforms, integration patterns, analytics architecture, master data, and enterprise data management.
• Help clients define how operational, CRM, financial, engagement, and analytical data should work together across the organization.

Data Governance & Data Quality

• Establish and advise on enterprise data governance frameworks.
• Define data ownership, stewardship, accountability, and decision-making structures.
• Develop data standards, business definitions, and data quality controls.
• Establish processes for: Data quality monitoring, Data remediation, Data ownership, Metadata and definitions, Data lifecycle management, Governance escalation and decision making.
• Partner with business and technical stakeholders to embed governance into operational processes rather than treating governance as a standalone initiative.

Integration Advisory

• Strategy & Planning: Design integration architectures and blueprints, map end-to-end data flows, define integration patterns, and establish technical requirements across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with business stakeholders, IT teams, application owners, architects, and external vendors to align integration requirements, priorities, dependencies, and business outcomes.
• Execution & Delivery Oversight: Provide technical leadership across design, development, testing, deployment, and stabilization while managing risks, dependencies, timelines, and overall solution quality.
• Support & Troubleshooting: Analyze integration failures, logs, data issues, and system errors; coordinate root-cause analysis and resolution of production incidents and interface issues.
• Integration Advisory: Serve as a subject matter expert on integration architecture, patterns, platforms, and best practices, recommending improvements that increase scalability, reliability, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
• Standards & Governance: Establish reusable integration standards, naming conventions, error-handling approaches, monitoring practices, security requirements, and documentation expectations.
• Platform Guidance: Advise on the appropriate use of APIs, batch/file processing, ETL/ELT, event-driven architecture, real-time and near-real-time integrations, and middleware/iPaaS platforms.
• Provide advisory guidance across platforms such as MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica, Workato, Azure, AWS, and similar enterprise integration technologies.

Required Qualifications

• Significant consulting experience leading complex enterprise data initiatives.
• Experience within Higher Education, preferably Advancement, fundraising, alumni relations, or constituent data.
• Experience with Ascend CRM strongly preferred.
• Strong hands-on SQL development capabilities.
• Experience with data migration, source-to-target mapping, transformation, data quality, integration, and reconciliation.
• Demonstrated ability to lead client engagements and communicate effectively with executive stakeholders.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical and functional teams.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data architecture, data governance, integration architecture, and data management principles.
• Experience designing or advising on APIs, ETL/ELT, batch, real-time, and event-driven integration patterns.
• Ability to move between executive strategy discussions and detailed technical problem solving.
• Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills.
• Demonstrated ability to build trusted advisor relationships with clients.
• Experience supporting sales and business development.
• Position requires flexibility to travel periodically based on business and client needs.