Director of Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering at Employers

Job description

Director of Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering | 100% Remote (WFH) Opportunity General Summary At EMPLOYERS, technology isn't just IT overhead — it's how we get injured workers back on their feet faster and help businesses stay protected. As Director of Technology, Enterprise Data Engineering, you'll lead the team building the modernized data foundation behind that mission. This role is accountable for workstreams that include running the business; keeping existing ingestion, orchestration, and streaming pipelines available and accurate; modernization, retiring the legacy Data Lake and Curated Data Store onto the Databricks platform; and net new, delivering ingestion, modeling, and curation for new and changing products. You'll lead a team of data engineers through and beyond this modernization, working hands-on alongside them, while serving as the closest engineering partner to Enterprise Architecture on data modeling and platform design decisions. You are responsible for setting the technical direction for how EIG builds data pipelines going forward, establishing the standards, patterns, and practices that keep the Databricks platform reliable, scalable, and audit-ready in a regulated industry, and championing responsible AI adoption in how the team works. As EIG shifts toward a distributed, pod-based operating model, this role increasingly leads through platform, standards, and AI-augmented tooling rather than direct central control — building the paved road that lets small, autonomous domain pods build and operate their own pipelines safely and quickly. Essential Duties and Responsibilities Leadership & People Management Builds, coaches, and develops a team of data engineering professionals, including performance reviews, workload balancing, and support for career growth. Leads hiring and staffing decisions to ensure the team has the skills needed to run the business, execute the Databricks migration, support the platform long-term, and deliver new product data. Manages a mix of employees, contractors, and vendor-supplied holding all of them to consistent standards and accountability. Coaches and holds accountable engineers embedded in cross-functional domain pods, even where those engineers do not report directly into this role. Builds redundancy into critical skills and keeps knowledge, runbooks, and design decisions documented so continuity does not depend on individual availability. Business Responsibilities Partners with Enterprise Architecture (Data Architect) to translate architectural direction into built pipelines, data models, and platform design decisions. Partners with Analytics Operations, Enterprise Data, and Business Intelligence/Strategy to ensure engineering output is structured to be consumed, certified, and trusted for all downstream needs without rework. Drives strategic planning, sequencing, and trade-off decisions for the data modeling of all initiatives and workstreams, applying the EMPLOYERS Delivery Life Cycle (DLC) methodology to deliver on time and within budget. Serves as the internal technical counterpart to the System Integration Partners and the Databricks advisory engagement, absorbing, contributing to, and documenting architectural and design decisions rather than deferring them externally. Maintains regular communication with Director peers, Digital & Data VPs, department heads, and stakeholders, translating complex technical topics into clear, business-friendly terms and flagging risks early. Enables autonomous development teams to build and operate Databricks pipelines thru self-service platform tooling, templates, and reference patterns, shifting from centralized delivery toward a “paved road” model as EIG moves toward a new operating model. Technical Responsibilities Owns data ingestion and the build of medallion architecture standards (bronze/silver/gold) across all domains. Builds and owns the semantic data layer (Unity Catalog objects, curated data sets) — partnering with Enter