Data Engineering Lead

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame partners with 150+ Global 2000 companies, offering access to over 50,000 training courses designed to help enterprises upgrade employee skills and reinvent their workforce for an AI-driven world. The company's strategic mission is to enable organizations to build productive, innovative teams through comprehensive learning and development solutions. Now, OpenSesame is building the next generation of its data infrastructure to support scaling operations and AI initiatives.

About the Team

The Data Engineering team is a lean, focused group with a critical mission: to build and scale an AI-ready data foundation that enables reliable analytics, operational reporting, governance, and future AI initiatives across the entire organization. This team works at the intersection of technical excellence and business impact, partnering closely with analysts, business leaders, platform teams, and data consumers company-wide.

Your role as Data Engineering Lead will be to guide this team in improving accessibility, trust, and usability of enterprise data assets while maintaining the highest standards for data quality, governance, and architectural scalability.

About the Role

As Data Engineering Lead, you will own the Data Governance & Accessibility program and serve as the technical leader responsible for designing scalable data architecture, improving pipeline reliability, mentoring data engineers, and enabling analysts through robust, specialized data solutions.

This is a hands-on leadership position requiring you to balance technical depth with strategic vision, cross-functional influence, and operational excellence. You will be responsible for:

• Data Architecture Design: Build scalable, AI-ready data platforms with standardized ingestion patterns, governance controls, and metadata management
• Pipeline Reliability: Introduce monitoring, alerting, and documentation standards that improve system reliability and analyst trust
• Team Leadership: Mentor a two-person data engineering team, providing structured technical reviews, backlog prioritization, and development planning
• Governance & Compliance: Establish company-wide standards for data ownership, quality monitoring, and lineage tracking
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Partner with analytics teams, business leaders, and platform engineers to align data solutions with organizational needs

Performance Objectives

30 Days:

• Develop comprehensive understanding of OpenSesame's current data ecosystem, governance practices, reporting dependencies, and analyst workflows
• Conduct full assessment of existing pipelines, warehouse architecture, data quality gaps, lineage visibility, and AI-readiness constraints
• Establish working relationships with analytics stakeholders across departments and create prioritized roadmap for improving governance, accessibility, and platform scalability
• Align the two-person engineering team around delivery standards and operating rhythms

60 Days:

• Design and begin implementing foundational architecture for AI-ready data platform, including standardized ingestion patterns, governance controls, metadata management, and scalable transformation frameworks
• Introduce monitoring, alerting, and documentation standards that improve reliability and analyst trust in shared datasets
• Mentor Data Engineers through structured technical reviews, backlog prioritization, and development planning
• Improve delivery velocity and reduce operational bottlenecks for analyst requests

90 Days:

• Launch first phase of Data Governance & Accessibility program by delivering production-ready, well-documented pipelines and certified datasets supporting multiple business functions
• Establish company-wide standards for data ownership, quality monitoring, and lineage tracking
• Create comprehensive data asset catalog with clear ownership models and SLAs

What We're Looking For

You are an experienced data engineering leader who combines technical expertise with mentorship capabilities. You excel at designing systems for scale, establishing governance practices that empower rather than restrict, and building teams around shared excellence. You understand the unique challenges of balancing analytical innovation with data reliability, and you have a track record of translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

💰 Compensation not publicly listed. Market estimate for similar roles: from $130K, varying by experience and location.