Director Data Engineering
- London
- Permanent
- Full-time
What you'll doThe Director of Data Engineering serves as a strategic and technical lead for Viasat's data platforms and products, driving architecture, roadmaps, and integration efforts across global entities. You will have the opportunity to collaborate with various business leads to craft the enterprise data landscape and lead a distributed team. Acting as a senior advisor, this position also cultivates alignment across multiple data communities while ensuring governance, scalability, and innovation in infrastructure and analytics solutions. In addition, this role supports the UK integration initiative and may occasionally provide hands-on engineering support as needed.
The day-to-day
- Develop and maintain the architectural vision and strategic roadmap for enterprise data platforms and products
- Partner with business and technology stakeholders to align on data initiatives, priorities, and long-term data landscape changes
- Serve as a senior technical advisor on data architecture, modeling approaches (e.g., Kimball, Data Vault, Data Mesh), and infrastructure decisions
- Support data governance and regulatory compliance efforts through effective information architecture and metadata management
- Promote a culture of engineering excellence, mentorship, and continuous improvement across the team
- Oversee a distributed team of data engineers to maintain high performance, delivery, and collaboration
- Provide occasional hands-on support to augment or backfill the team when necessary, particularly during resource constraints
- Drive M&A integration of Viasat’s data ecosystem, ensuring consistency and scalability
- Oversee implementation of modern data stack tools, including SQL, DBT, BigQuery, Airflow/Prefect
- Function as a central point of coordination for internal data communities, encouraging alignment on tools, standards, and successful approaches
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 3–5 years in a technical leadership or architectural role
- Experience designing and implementing large-scale data platforms and modern data architectures (e.g., data mesh, data lakes, data warehouses)
- Strong expertise in enterprise data modeling methodologies such as Kimball, Data Vault, and Data Mesh principles
- Proficiency in SQL, DBT, and modern data stack tools (e.g., BigQuery, Airflow, or Prefect)
- Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams (onshore/offshore), including hiring, mentoring, and delivery oversight
- Deep understanding of information architecture, metadata management, and data governance frameworks
- Hands-on knowledge of cloud data ecosystems (GCP preferred, but AWS or Azure also relevant)
- Good communication and customer management skills, with experience engaging a variety of teams and executives
- Ability to drive integration efforts across global business units and acquired entities
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience)
- Ability to align data strategy with business processes behind enterprise SaaS systems, including establishing clear data contracts with project managers and product owners across source systems
- Deep understanding of data mesh architecture tradeoffs, with the ability to guide teams on where centralized vs. decentralized data ownership makes the most sense
- Strength in customer management, especially in federated environments where business units own their own GCP projects, requiring careful coordination and governance