The Athletic is a direct-to-consumer digital sports media company committed to helping subscribers experience storytelling in a whole new way. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, The Athletic has over 500 full-time employees and covers more than 250 professional sports and collegiate teams in the US, Canada and the UK. The Athletic’s newsroom has produced thousands of in-depth articles along with more than 120 podcasts and premium video content. The Athletic is a remote-friendly company as we have offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, and Melbourne.

As our Director of Data, You'll be leading 3 teams: data engineering, data science, and analytics engineering. Your team will own all data infrastructure for The Athletic: MySQL and DynamoDB production databases, analytics data streaming pipeline using Kubernetes, Kafka, EMR (Spark), S3, Airflow, DBT, and Redshift, all hosted in AWS. Among other things, the teams you oversee will work on: scaling our data infrastructure, building and deploying data science models, creating data models, and monitoring data quality in supporting our product and 

analytics teams. 

You should be interested in building systems for scale, performance, and reliability. We all wear a lot of hats, so you’ll have the opportunity to work on infrastructure, ETL, database administration, data modeling, microservice and model deployment, testing, experiments, and more depending on your interests.  

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of data engineers, data scientists, and analytics engineers. Architect solutions, provide mentorship, give guidance.
• Partner with Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Analytics teams to build and deploy pipelines and features backed by machine learning and modern data toolsets.
• Inform, influence, support, and execute our product decisions.
• Manage development of data resources, gather requirements, organize sources, and support product launches.
• Build/maintain dashboards, metrics, and alerting to monitor the performance of our data quality.
• Own data ecosystem including stability of internal structure and connection with external data vendors.
• Articulate, evangelize and pursue a long-term vision for Data at The Athletic, and foster a data-driven culture of innovation throughout the company.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Physics, Engineering, or related quantitative field.
• 10+ years data engineering experience.
• 5+ years of experience in leading a data engineering (or similar) team.
• 5+ years of experience with Python, SQL or other programming languages.
• 2+ years of experience with Docker, AWS, or similar environment.
• Experience initiating and driving projects to completion with minimal guidance.
• Experience communicating to executive team and project stakeholders.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience with Kafka, Kubernetes, Redshift, and Spark.
• Experience with large data sets and distributed computing (Hive/Hadoop).
• Experience with data science or managing a data science team.
• Experience with DBT and other BI data modeling tools.