Chief Engineer, Global Data
$208,000–$255,000 year
On-siteAustin, Texas, United States or Englewood, Colorado, United States
Job Summary
Translate business strategy into technical priorities and execution plans for global data platforms, pipelines, and products. Define technical strategy across data governance, quality, delivery, and modernization while acting as a technical chief of staff to clarify goals, structure work, and unblock teams. Partner with Engineering, Product, Architecture, and business leaders to align roadmaps, lead technical reviews, and establish standards that improve quality and speed. Identify opportunities to apply AI, automation, and intelligent QA across the organization, creating clear narratives and tradeoff analyses for executive decision-making. Mentor senior engineers and architects to build a culture of technical rigor and pragmatic innovation.
Required Qualifications
- 15+ years of software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, architecture, or technical leadership experience
- Experience operating as a senior technical leader across complex, distributed, data-intensive systems
- Strong architecture judgment across data platforms, APIs, pipelines, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, integration patterns, and operational tooling
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives without relying solely on formal authority
- AI-forward mindset with practical experience or strong fluency in applying AI to engineering, data quality, automation, analytics, knowledge workflows, developer productivity, or intelligent products
- Strong ability to simplify complex technical issues into clear decisions, priorities, and executive-level narratives
- Experience improving engineering execution: planning, technical discovery, delivery quality, observability, incident learning, and operational excellence
- Strong understanding of data governance, data quality, data lineage, metadata, validation, and lifecycle management
- Ability to work across legacy systems and modern cloud-native architectures
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to engage deeply with engineers and clearly with executives
- Builder mindset: willing to prototype, inspect systems directly, ask sharp questions, and turn ambiguity into forward motion
- High judgment, low ego, and strong bias for practical outcomes
Desired Qualifications
- Aviation, aerospace, navigation, geospatial, mapping, logistics, transportation, defense, or safety-critical software experience
- Experience with aeronautical data, airport mapping, charts, routing, flight planning, weather, or operational aviation systems
- Experience with AI-enabled data validation, anomaly detection, semantic search, RAG, agentic workflows, model evaluation, or human-in-the-loop review systems
- Experience leading technical modernization in a private-equity-backed, high-growth, or transformation-oriented environment
- Experience with regulatory, compliance-sensitive, or mission-critical data products
- Experience partnering directly with VP/SVP/C-level leaders as a technical advisor or chief-of-staff-style operator
- Experience with cloud platforms, data lake/lakehouse architectures, event-driven systems, APIs, geospatial data systems, and modern data observability tools
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