Director of Data Engineering

Strategic Leadership

• Define and drive the long-term strategy for Workiva's multi-tenant data platform, aligning with enterprise-wide data strategy and business priorities.
• Partner with product, security, and engineering leaders to ensure the platform meets the highest standards of security, compliance, and governance.
• Champion the creation of data domain models that integrate seamlessly with ERP and other enterprise systems, accelerating enterprise integration.
• Influence executive stakeholders by clearly articulating the platform's value proposition and securing organizational alignment.

Platform Evolution & Operational Excellence

• Oversee the design, scaling, and continuous improvement of the platform's ingestion, transformation, and serving layers.
• Ensure the platform is robust, cost-efficient, observable, and optimized for multi-tenant scale.
• Establish standards for monitoring, alerting, disaster recovery, and incident response to maintain the highest availability and resilience.
• Anticipate future growth and drive the evolution of platform capabilities to support analytics, AI/ML, and external-facing data products.
• Establish and enforce cost transparency mechanisms, enabling application teams to understand, forecast, and optimize their platform usage.

Team Building & Leadership

• Build, scale, and lead a high-performing data engineering organization distributed across Europe and the US.
• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and excellence where engineers are empowered to take ownership and deliver impact.
• Develop future leaders by mentoring engineering managers and senior engineers within the team.
• Drive hiring and retention strategies to grow a diverse, world-class team aligned with the platform's mission.

Execution & Delivery

• Translate strategy into actionable roadmaps and oversee execution across multiple squads (e.g., ingestion, transformation, serving).
• Ensure delivery of secure, reliable, and self-service capabilities that enable application teams and customers to innovate rapidly.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to deliver internal and external data products with clear business value.
• Establish and track meaningful KPIs around adoption, reliability, cost transparency, and customer outcomes.

This role creates positive change by building and leading a world-class data engineering organization that powers Workiva's multi-tenant data platform, which underpins enterprise and customer-facing applications, delivering measurable value to customers and empowering application teams to innovate rapidly.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• 10+ years of related engineering experience
• 3+ years of direct people management experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience managing and scaling distributed engineering teams, ideally in a data engineering or platform engineering context
• Strong expertise in data platforms, including ingestion frameworks (e.g., DLT, Kafka), transformation tools (e.g. dbt), and serving layers (e.g., Snowflake, Superset)
• Track record of delivering high-quality, self-service data solutions in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
• Exceptional leadership and team-building skills, with the ability to inspire and align a diverse group of engineers
• Deep understanding of operational processes, observability, and metrics for running production-grade platforms
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a focus on metrics-driven decision-making

✅ Salary range in the US: $177,000.00 - $284,000.00

✅ A discretionary bonus typically paid annually

✅ Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire

✅ 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

✅ Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment

Workiva is a company that provides a multi-tenant data platform underpinning enterprise and customer-facing applications, operating at scale under high standards of security, governance, and reliability to empower innovation and deliver value to customers.