Title: Senior Director of Engineering & Data Location: Miami, FL (onsite) Industry: Retail/Consumer Goods Contact: Christian.ramirez@forsythbarnes.com

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This is a full-time position, not eligible for C2C or C2H.

I have partnered with a leading consumer brand looking to hire a Senior Director of Engineering to drive their Intelligence Engineering capabilities. This org serves as the data and AI backbone for the company, processing billions of transactions, delivering advanced analytics and GenAI solutions.

This role will drive cross-functional teams to build scalable, cost-efficient, and high-quality data products that empower employees, stakeholders, and customers alike.

Key Responsibilities: Own the Intelligence Leads charter and forums, align quarterly roadmaps and OKRs across Snowflake cost optimization, AWS cost management, GenAI/RAG/MCP initiatives, and data-governance programs (DSAR, retention automation, PII anonymization). Lead migration from Redshift/Informatica to a Snowflake-centric, streaming-friendly architecture; drive vendor and contract strategy (Informatica, AWS Glue, Keboola, Sigma) and partner with finance on budget vs. forecast. Define vision, principles, and ethical guardrails for Generative AI, predictive modeling, and MLOps; prioritize and deliver flagship AI products including RAG chatbots, fraud detection, and demand forecasting; champion practices like feature stores, automated data quality, and synthetic-data generation. Enforce governance, retention, and compliance standards; strengthen engineering practices through change-management, on-call standards, RCA reviews, expanded playbooks, and institutionalized excellence. Hire, coach, and retain top talent across data engineering, ML, product, and ops; optimize team structures (pods, guilds) for autonomy; lead cross-team program delivery (e.g., Snowflake Kinesis NRT streaming, MCP server auth redesign, franchisee analytics); manage pipelines, onboarding, and career growth while reporting KPIs on velocity, reliability, spend, and business impact.

Qualifications: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Data Engineering, AI/ML, or related field; 12+ years building large-scale data/analytics platforms and 7+ years leading multi-team organizations, managing 20–30 people including contractors. Proven success delivering production ML/AI systems such as LLM fine-tuning, RAG, forecasting, and anomaly detection; hands-on experience with Snowflake Cortex, vector databases, and LangChain-style orchestration. Deep expertise in Snowflake, AWS (Kinesis, Bedrock, SageMaker), Kafka, dbt, Airflow, and MLOps tooling (MLflow, SageMaker Pipelines); strong track record in cloud cost optimization and FinOps. Extensive knowledge of data-governance frameworks (GDPR/DSAR, SOX) and privacy-by-design patterns; experience with franchise, retail, or quick-service restaurant systems. Ability to set bold vision, inspire diverse teams, mentor talent, and influence VP/SVP-level stakeholders; exceptional communication skills for technical architecture discussions and executive AI ROI presentations.