Data Practice Director

The Role

The Data Practice Director is a senior leadership role within Caylent's Cloud Data Engineering (CDE) practice, reporting directly to the Data Practice Leader. This person is responsible for operationalizing the practice strategy, leading a team of data professionals, and owning delivery excellence across a portfolio of client engagements. They are the connective tissue between strategic direction and day-to-day execution, ensuring the practice delivers consistent, high-quality outcomes while scaling to meet growth targets.

Your Assignment

Practice Operations and Delivery

• Own end-to-end delivery oversight for a portfolio of data engineering and analytics engagements, ensuring on-time, on-budget, and high-quality outcomes.
• Drive operational rigor across the practice including utilization management, staffing coordination, margin tracking, and engagement health reviews.
• Develop and enforce delivery standards, reusable frameworks, and best practices that enable consistent, scalable execution across the team.
• Serve as an escalation point for active engagements, helping resolve technical blockers, scope issues, and client concerns in partnership with delivery leads.
• Partner with the Practice Leader to translate the strategic roadmap into executable quarterly priorities and team-level OKRs.

Team Leadership and Development

• Directly lead and develop a team of data engineers, architects, and analytics professionals across the practice.
• Set clear performance expectations, conduct regular reviews, and provide ongoing coaching to build a high-performing, engaged team.
• Partner with recruiting and workforce planning to identify talent gaps, support hiring decisions, and onboard new team members effectively.
• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous learning, and technical excellence across a globally distributed team.
• Identify and develop emerging leaders within the practice, creating growth pathways aligned to practice needs.

Client Engagement

• Build trusted advisor relationships with key client stakeholders, acting as a senior point of contact for delivery and strategic guidance.
• Partner with the sales and GTM teams to support business development activities including scoping, proposal development, and technical solutioning for new and existing accounts.
• Identify and pursue expansion opportunities within active client engagements, surfacing new use cases and service offerings that align with client needs.
• Represent Caylent with credibility and professionalism in client-facing conversations at the director and VP level.

Practice Growth and Enablement

• Collaborate with the Practice Leader on go-to-market positioning, service offering development, and internal capability building.
• Contribute to thought leadership content including whitepapers, webinars, and conference presentations that elevate the practice's external profile.
• Stay current on trends in the modern data ecosystem and work with the team to incorporate relevant innovations into our delivery approach.
• Support the development of practice IP including accelerators, reference architectures, and reusable solution components.

Experience

Your Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in professional services or consulting, with a strong focus on data engineering, analytics, or data platform delivery.
• Demonstrated success managing and growing a team of 20 or more data professionals in a services or consulting environment.
• Proven track record of delivering complex data projects on AWS, including data lake, lakehouse, streaming, and analytics workloads.
• Experience managing a portfolio of concurrent client engagements, balancing delivery quality with financial performance.
• Hands-on background in data architecture or engineering, with the ability to engage credibly with technical teams and client stakeholders alike.

Leadership

• Strong people management skills with demonstrated ability to develop talent, drive performance, and build team culture across geographies.
• Ability to operate effectively at multiple levels, from strategic planning conversations with the Practice Leader to hands-on engagement support with delivery teams.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and complexity in a fast-paced, high-growth consulting environment.
• Experience influencing senior client stakeholders (director, VP and C-level) in delivery and advisory contexts.

Technical Acumen

• Deep familiarity with the AWS data ecosystem including services such as Redshift, Glue, EMR, Kinesis, Lake Formation, and Athena.
• Working knowledge of adjacent platforms including Databricks and Snowflake, and their integration with AWS-native architectures.
• Broad understanding of data engineering fundamentals: ingestion patterns, transformation frameworks (e.g., Spark, dbt), data modeling, governance, and quality management.
• Familiarity with MLOps and data science workflows sufficient to support and position those capabilities in client conversations.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field.
• Master's degree or MBA is a plus.

Certifications

• AWS Certified Data Analytics, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, or equivalent certifications are a plus.

Preferred Qualifications

• Execution-Oriented: Skilled at translating strategy into structured plans and holding teams accountable to outcomes.
• Client-First Mindset: Genuinely invested in client success and capable of building durable, trust-based relationships.
• Collaborative Partner: Works effectively across sales, delivery, and practice leadership functions without siloed thinking.
• Clear Communicator: Able to convey complex technical and business concepts to diverse audiences with clarity and confidence.
• Growth Driver: Passionate about building teams, capabilities, and client relationships that compound over time.