The Associate Director, Data Solutions is responsible for the successful outcomes of multiple client engagements with high technical and organizational complexity, ensuring that business results are optimized, and strategic objectives are met. Associate Directors should independently drive the value creation for their clients, whereas their respective Director/Senior Director is the primary point of contact for executive relationship management and with occasional input to engagements.

In addition, this role directly manages team members within the Data Solutions team. The Associate Director, Data Solutions works closely with key client stakeholders to translate vision and business requirements into solutions and to mobilize high performing teams by leveraging best practices across engineering, agile development, and project management. This role will also contribute to new business initiatives in close partnership with the Sales team, such as proposal writing, sales calls, conferences and strategic partnership relationships. 

The Associate Director, Data Solutions is a strategic cross functional position that will partner closely with client services, functional leads, and leadership teams.

Strategic Leadership: You are responsible for contributing to the development and communicating the vision of our data solutions. This includes creating buy-in for the product vision both internally and with our clients.

Cross-Team Collaboration: You are responsible for collaborating with other functional departments to ensure alignment with the goals of the data solutions engagement.

Engagement Delivery: You are accountable to ensuring our data solutions strategies are effectively implemented, including achieving key project milestones and meeting billable targets. 

Responsibilities Breakdown

Client Tier Responsibility: Associate Directors of Data Solutions can expect to work with data engagements that are highly complex technically and organizationally, and typically involves enterprise-level companies, while also providing oversight of other engagements owned by Senior Managers, Managers, and Leads in the Data Solutions team. Across these indirectly-driven assignments, there may be a mix of engagements with variations in technical and organizational complexity ranging from low to high.

Strategic Leadership

• Facilitate workshops to crystallize business goals and objectives, define current and future business processes 

• Identify and develop data solutions positioning strategies to contribute to sales 
• Partner with Directors and VPs on sales calls and RFP development
• Drafts proposals and structures engagements for review by their manager or VP
• Contribute thought leadership internally, to a core growth strategy (PE/VC, partnerships (Snowflake, Sigma, Fivetran, etc), and externally (e.g. speaking engagements, panels, guest blogs, etc.)
• May attend conferences, partnership events and meet in person with clients or prospects

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Manage project schedules and team workload to optimize team capacity and velocity 
• Work closely with finance on month-end invoicing to best understand and optimize revenue and margin goals 
• Work with sales and project delivery teams to perform strategic account planning, grow business within existing account, and to prepare proposals and project changes requests

• Leads sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives with team and/or stakeholder, for engagements you are running directly; coordinates with project managers, as needed, on larger engagements

Engagement Delivery

• Manage small team of Data Solutions Senior Managers, Managers, and/or Leads 
• Lead successful delivery of client projects within defined budget, schedule, and scope with outstanding client satisfaction  
• Deliver regular internal and external project status reports to executives and other key stakeholders, including clients
• Lead integrated project teams to ensure outstanding satisfaction for clients and internal delivery teams
• Proactively identify, track and mitigate issues and risks   
• Use metrics and data to effectively measure impact and to evaluate success of initiatives
• Accurately plans, tracks, and manages project financials and resource requirements; accountable to financials and develops strategies to hit billable targets

Technical Skills (Hard Skills)

• Tool requirements: Intermediate to advanced proficiency / familiarity with the core components of a modern data platform: 
• Data ingestion SaaS (e.g., Fivetran, Stitch, etc)
• Massively parallel processing data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift)
• Data transformation tools (e.g., dbt, Matiallion, SQLMesh)
• Cloud-forward business intelligence platform (e.g., Tableau, Sigma, Looker). 

And how all of the above pieces fit together to deliver value to the client, including the ability (which may include asking your functional peers for support) to weigh pros and cons, from a technical and business perspective. Associate Directors should be able to both understand how the pieces fit together, and explain and mentor their reports on how to deliver this infrastructure on their own projects.

• Agile Professional: You are well equipped to tackle unforeseen situations, capable of jumping in to assist projects and teams at any point in their development. You may lead other managers in how to set Agile goals, develop viable plans, and implement Agile approaches.

Essential Skills (Intangible Skills)

• Strategic Mindset: You actively work to understand all aspects of the business. You autonomously look for data wherever you need to aid your own and the team's understanding. You coach others in using business needs.

• Collaboration & Partnership: You can steward and coordinate complex and/or large scale collaborative group workshops and events with colleagues or external stakeholders. You can quickly find common ground and productively engage others toward a solution/course of action to maximize the benefit to the team, project, and/or external stakeholders, as needed.
• Effective Communication: You are able to communicate effectively across the company. You can lead interactions with external stakeholders, giving continuous feedback and coaching others in this competency.

• Developing Others: You are exporting your process and mindset to other teams in the organization. Your supporting materials and frameworks have been adopted by multiple teams, and you champion and support them. You are mentoring others in developing your own teams.

• Human-Centered Design: You help your team use data as a tool, working closely with analysts and thinking through short and medium term experiments. Your work approaches involves recognizing others' needs from the start through the end, pushing for better definitions of outcomes. 

Qualifications (Must Haves)

• Demonstrated engagement management or project management experience with track record of leading the delivery of enterprise level solutions in a professional service capacity 
• Hands on experience as an analyst, analytics engineer, or data engineer 
• Strong project and people-management skills 
• Strong analytic, critical thinking, and creative capabilities 
• Organized and process oriented.  
• Ability to speak to all levels of prospective clients: strategic and tactical decision makers 
• Excellent interpersonal, communication and written skills

Physical Requirements

• Frequent sitting at a desk performing work on a computer
• Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions
• Regular domestic travel will be required

Compensation Range: $160,000 - $175,000 annually.

Please note that compensation packages are finalized after the interview process is concluded. We use a competency-based approach to base pay, which means it is based on the competencies and skills demonstrated for this role.

Core Company Values

Velir is an established mid-sized agency with a top-tier portfolio of clients, ranging from the world’s largest non-profits to Fortune 500 brands. We pride ourselves on our people-first culture and a low-ego workplace that embraces experimentation, collaboration and continuous improvement. We have a fun office environment located in Davis Square (Somerville, MA) and offer competitive pay and excellent benefits.

• Take the Long View - Ensure the company is built to last
• Be Courageous - Make the right decisions even when they aren't the easiest decisions
• Be Genuine - Bring honesty and authenticity to all that you do
• Work with Focus + Passion - Display purpose and pride in your work and never stop learning

As an equal opportunity employer, we are firmly committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our hiring efforts. We recognize that we need team members from all backgrounds and experiences to successfully shape a positive employee experience as well as deliver our product and service solutions. To that end, we actively seek candidates who can bring diverse experiences and backgrounds to our team. We know that complex factors and systemic bias can get in the way of us meeting strong candidates, so please don't hesitate to apply even if you're not 100% sure.

At this time, Velir does not sponsor candidates and unfortunately cannot accept those on OPT or CPT.

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