Director,DataCollective

About Sovrn Every interesting company solves important problems for other people. Sovrn is a Software and Data business that helps Open Web businesses be and remain independent. We help them understand their business better, operate more efficiently, and make lead architecture and design across the platform; and remain close enough to the code, the systems, and the tradeoffs to make real technical decisions, not just approve them. You'll be working with a strong senior team, a modern stack, and an organization that already uses LLMs and agentic tooling across the data stack. We're looking for a leader who can take what's working from "in use" to "intentional practice." Someone with strong opinions about what high-leverage AI-native data engineering looks like at exchange scale, and the credibility to bring the rest of the org along. Languages / components / tools in our stack: Python, Redpanda/Kafka, Databricks/Spark, AWS/S3, Terraform, Datadog, GitHub What you'll be doing: Team Leadership lead hiring and performance management for engineers ranging from mid-level to Principal Set the technical and cultural standards for the team: what "great" looks like in design, code review, on-call, and cross-team partnership Mentor and grow engineers across levels through hands-on design collaboration, technical coaching, and clear career frameworks Partner with the broader engineering leadership team on org-wide planning, budgeting, and roadmap tradeoffs; represent the team's work and constraints to executives Data Platform Architecture raise the bar on engineering rigor, observability, and operational excellence Stay close enough to the systems to make real tradeoffs on performance, cost, governance, and reliability, and to know when the team's estimates and risk assessments are right AI drive structural cost improvements through architecture, and disciplined commitment management Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) adoption, policy-as-code, governance frameworks (RBAC/ABAC, I