Director, Data Engineering

Title: Director, Data Engineering remote opportunity

Location: United States

Job Description:

Description/Responsibilities

We are seeking a Director of Data Engineering to lead the Enterprise Data Foundation (EDF) team at Tivity Health. This role is responsible for the full lifecycle of our enterprise data platform - spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, and delivery - across two distinct business domains: our core Fitness business and our Whole Health Living (WHL) healthcare business.

The Director will manage a team of approximately 10 engineers and QA professionals, set technical direction for platform architecture and evolution, and partner cross-functionally with Data Governance, BI & Reporting, Product Engineering, and business stakeholders to ensure data infrastructure meets both current operational needs and future strategic objectives. This is primarily a people management and technical leadership role - the successful candidate must be able to review architectural decisions, evaluate code and pipeline designs, and direct engineering execution, not simply approve timesheets.

This role reports to the VP of Data and works as a peer alongside the BI & Reporting Lead and the Senior Data Governance Strategist within the Data Management department.

Responsibilities:

People Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of ~10 data engineers and QA professionals across ETL development, platform operations, and quality assurance.
• Conduct performance management including goal-setting, regular 1:1s, career development planning, and performance reviews.
• Drive team capacity planning, hiring, and onboarding for new engineering and QA roles.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Coordinate workload across team members, balancing project delivery, operational support, and technical debt reduction.

Data Architecture & Platform Strategy

• Own the architectural vision for Tivity Health''s enterprise data platform, spanning Snowflake, AWS data services, and on-premises legacy systems.
• Define and execute the platform evolution roadmap, including modernization of batch ETL toward real-time and event-driven architectures, adoption of open table formats (Apache Iceberg), and progressive elimination of legacy infrastructure.
• Evaluate and recommend emerging technologies (e.g., zero-ETL integrations, lakehouse patterns, streaming CDC) aligned to business needs and total cost of ownership.
• Ensure platform designs support scalability, reliability, security, and compliance requirements across both Fitness and WHL healthcare domains.
• Establish and enforce data engineering standards, patterns, and best practices for pipeline development, infrastructure-as-code, testing, and deployment.
• Partner with Data Governance to ensure platform architecture enables cataloging, lineage, quality measurement, and access control at enterprise scale.

Engineering Delivery & Operations

• Oversee design, development, and maintenance of production ETL pipelines (AWS Glue, DMS, Snowflake Tasks) processing data from RDS, DynamoDB, MSSQL, Oracle EBS, SaaS APIs, and file-based sources into Snowflake.
• Own pipeline reliability and incident response, maintaining 99%+ ETL success rates across both Fitness and WHL platforms.
• Direct the team''s infrastructure-as-code practice (Pulumi) for all Snowflake and AWS resource provisioning and change management.
• Review and approve architectural decisions, pipeline designs, data models, and production changes - ensuring technical rigor without being the bottleneck.
• Drive the completion of legacy platform migration (on-premises SQL Server reporting to Snowflake) and retirement of end-of-life systems.
• Manage operational metrics, SLAs, and capacity planning for data infrastructure (compute, storage, pipeline throughput).

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with the BI & Reporting team to ensure the consumption layer (Tableau, S3 exports, client deliverables) has performant, reliable, well-documented data assets.
• Collaborate with Data Governance on data quality rule implementation, business term definitions, catalog completeness, and compliance controls.
• Work with Product Engineering and DevOps on shared infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and platform security.
• Communicate platform status, risks, and roadmap to senior IT leadership and business stakeholders.

Platform Scope

The EDF team owns and operates the foundational data platform that all analytics, reporting, governance, and data science teams consume. The current platform includes:

• Snowflake Data Cloud - AWS Data tooling
• Snowflake Tasks
• Infrastructure-as-Code - Pulumi-managed deployments for all Snowflake resources (databases, schemas, roles, warehouses, tasks) and AWS resources (Glue, S3, IAM, DMS).
• Legacy Systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor''s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related quantitative field preferred. Experience in lieu of education will be considered.
• 6+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering or data architecture roles.
• 3+ years of direct people management experience leading technical teams.
• Expert-level SQL proficiency and working knowledge of Python for data engineering.
• Experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or Databricks) at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated ability to define and execute multi-year platform modernization roadmaps.
• Experience operating in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment (healthcare, financial services, or similar).

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform roles.
• 5+ years in a management or leadership role directing data engineering teams of 5+ members.
• Deep expertise with Snowflake (architecture, performance tuning, security model, cost optimization) and AWS data services (Glue, DMS, S3, Lambda, Lake Formation).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating layered data warehouse architectures (Raw/Staging → Integration → Presentation → Analytics/Consumption).
• Strong background in ETL/ELT pipeline design, including incremental loading patterns, change data capture, SCD Type 2, and data quality validation.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi, Terraform, or CDK) for managing cloud data resources through CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with modern data platform patterns: Apache Iceberg / open table formats, lakehouse architectures, event-driven / streaming pipelines, and zero-ETL integrations.
• Experience with healthcare data systems (claims adjudication, eligibility, provider networks) is strongly preferred given the WHL domain scope.
• Understanding of data governance frameworks, metadata management, data cataloging, and lineage - sufficient to partner effectively with a dedicated governance function.
• Experience managing both engineering and QA disciplines within a data platform team.
• Strong communication skills with ability to translate technical platform decisions into business value for non-technical stakeholders.

The salary range for this opportunity is $137,700 to $175,000. Compensation depends on several factors: qualifications, skills, competencies, and experience.

Tivity Health offers a robust benefits package, which includes a competitive salary, company bonus potential, medical, dental, vision, 401k with match, generous paid time off, free gym membership to over 13,000 fitness locations in the US, and other great benefits.