Director of Engineering, Data
- $260,000–$280,000 per year
- Hybrid
- All software engineering jobs
- Full-Time
- Data Platform
About the role
About Gridware
Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.Gridware.io.
Role Overview
We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Gridware's company-wide data platforms. This is a hands-on, manager-of-managers role: you'll set the architecture, drive the roadmap, and build the team, on a platform that's live and in production today: real customers, a legacy migration in flight, and a federated ownership model across a large number of business domains.
You'll be working with novel, never-before-seen data: high-frequency mechanical, acoustic, electrical, and environmental signal from tens of thousands of power-constrained edge devices with intermittent connectivity, where ground truth comes from line crews in the field rather than a labeling vendor. This role will define new data problems that can be solved and change what the rest of the organization believes is possible with Gridware data.
Role Overview
We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Gridware's company-wide data platforms. This is a hands-on, manager-of-managers role: you'll set the architecture, drive the roadmap, and build the team, on a platform that's live and in production today: real customers, a legacy migration in flight, and a federated ownership model across a large number of business domains.
You'll be working with novel, never-before-seen data: high-frequency mechanical, acoustic, electrical, and environmental signal from tens of thousands of power-constrained edge devices with intermittent connectivity, where ground truth comes from line crews in the field rather than a labeling vendor. This role will define new data problems that can be solved and change what the rest of the organization believes is possible with Gridware data.
Responsibilities
- Platform architecture and delivery
• Own the data platform end to end: ingestion, transformation, raw and sanitized data layers, and overall data architecture.
• Drive data quality, observability, lineage, and governance across the organization.
• Advance legacy migrations and step-change improvements to data platforms without disrupting the teams already depending on them.
Enablement and adoption
• Own the tooling, patterns, and support that let business domains build and maintain their own analytics and reporting under a federated ownership model.
• Build the data foundations that machine learning and applied research depend on.
• Drive analytics enablement for both technical and non-technical teams across the company.
Org building
• Hire and design the data organization as it grows over the next year.
• Build and grow a world-class team of data engineering leaders.
Required Skills
- • 10+ years in data engineering or data platform roles, including 5+ years in engineering management roles, currently or most recently managing managers.
• Hands-on experience with modern lakehouse and streaming tooling (e.g., Databricks, Kafka, Kinesis, CDC pipelines, Airflow, Terraform) and able to contribute heavily to an architecture review with the team.
• Background in high-volume, machine-generated data: telemetry, sensor, IoT, observability, or logs, rather than primarily transactional or clickstream data.
• Experience running a data platform with real internal business stakeholders beyond engineering.
• Experience operating in a federated or domain-ownership model, with a clear point of view on what worked and what didn't.
• Experience building or substantially rebuilding platform capability, not only maintaining a mature platform.
Bonus Skills
- • Background in physical-world or safety-critical systems: energy, IoT, robotics, autonomy, or aerospace.
• Experience with edge/cloud architecture under power or bandwidth constraints.
• Experience migrating an organization off a fragmented legacy state while it stayed live.
• Experience scaling with a company through a period of significant growth.
• Experience with data science, analyzing complex data to help the company make smart business decisions.
