Senior Vice President, Data Operations

About The Position

Major goals and objectives and location requirements
We are seeking a Senior Vice President of Data Operations to lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of our enterprise-wide data infrastructure. As a data-first media company operating at petabyte scale, data is the connective tissue across our editorial, product, advertising, and audience development functions. This is a defining leadership role for someone who can operate at the intersection of deep technical excellence and enterprise strategy — architecting the systems that power how we understand our content, our audiences, and our business.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a multi-year data platform strategy, aligned to company-wide goals across content, audience, advertising, and product.
• Serve as the executive voice of data — advising the CTO and C-suite on data architecture decisions, investments, and organizational structure, influencing how the company measures success.
• Translate complex data capabilities into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders.
• Establish a data-first culture across the organization, advocating for data literacy, democratization, and responsible use.
• Build and lead a high-performing team, partnering closely with Engineering, Data Science, Ad Tech, Research, Product, Editorial, Revenue, Business, and Marketing leadership, serving as the company's foremost authority on all things data.

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field is required; a Master's or PhD is a plus.
• Experience: 15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or analytics infrastructure. At least 5 years of experience in a senior leadership role. Proven track record designing and scaling petabyte-level data platforms in a high-traffic, data-intensive industry (preferably media, e-commerce, fintech, or similar).
• Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications & Abilities: Deep expertise across the modern data stack: data lakes/lakehouses, cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Dataflow), and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster). Strong command of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and experience managing large-scale distributed systems at production quality. Experience establishing data governance programs, metadata management, and data quality frameworks at enterprise scale. Strategic mindset: comfortable defining a 3-year roadmap and equally comfortable making pragmatic architectural trade-offs in the near term. Exceptional communication and executive presence—ability to speak fluently with engineers and senior management alike. Experience in digital media, content platforms, or advertising technology is strongly preferred.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field is required; a Master's or PhD is a plus.
• Experience: 15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or analytics infrastructure. At least 5 years of experience in a senior leadership role. Proven track record designing and scaling petabyte-level data platforms in a high-traffic, data-intensive industry (preferably media, e-commerce, fintech, or similar).
• Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications & Abilities: Deep expertise across the modern data stack: data lakes/lakehouses, cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), stream processing (Kafka, Flink, Dataflow), and orchestration (Airflow, Dagster). Strong command of cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and experience managing large-scale distributed systems at production quality. Experience establishing data governance programs, metadata management, and data quality frameworks at enterprise scale. Strategic mindset: comfortable defining a 3-year roadmap and equally comfortable making pragmatic architectural trade-offs in the near term. Exceptional communication and executive presence—ability to speak fluently with engineers and senior management alike. Experience in digital media, content platforms, or advertising technology is strongly preferred.

Benefits

People Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. In addition, the Company provides to employees (and their eligible family members) a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, unlimited paid time off (PTO), adoption or surrogate assistance, donation matching, tuition reimbursement, basic life insurance, basic accidental death & dismemberment, supplemental life insurance, supplemental accident insurance, commuter benefits, short term and long term disability, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family care benefits, a generous 401K savings plan with a company match program, 10-12 paid holidays annually, and generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents).

Pay

New York: $315,000.00 - $375,000.00

The pay range above represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position and may change in the future. Actual pay may vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to work location, experience, and performance.