Technical Program Manager, Data Lake
ansira
Job Summary
Ansira is consolidating and scaling a unified, enterprise Data Lake to integrate product, media, and business data, standardize reporting, and accelerate decision-making. This Technical Program Manager will lead this cross-functional program end-to-end, aligning roadmaps, driving ingestion and migration, maturing data governance and quality, and ensuring business adoption of self-serve analytics. The role is high-visibility, aiming to unify Ansira’s data foundation and improve insights across products and services through a modern, governed data platform.
Must Have
- Lead end-to-end Data Lake program, including roadmap, budget, and risks.
- Drive migration from legacy data systems to modern cloud data stack.
- Define and manage Data Lake program backlog and data contracts.
- Establish and monitor data governance, quality, and security practices.
- Orchestrate work across Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Business teams.
- Manage change adoption for standardized reporting and data usage.
- Possess technical fluency in modern data stacks (Snowflake, Azure, dbt).
- 8+ years in Program/Project/Product Management, 5+ years in data platforms.
- Strong experience with Agile methodologies and project tools (Jira, Confluence).
- Competent in SQL for data validation and triage.
Good to Have
- Background in marketing/media data and standardized performance reporting.
- Experience migrating from legacy ETL/BI ecosystems (Alteryx/Insighter/Tableau).
- Experience establishing data domains and productizing data (SLAs, contracts, versioning).
- Familiarity with privacy, security, and compliance standards (RBAC/ABAC, PII governance).
- FinOps mindset: cost observability, unit economics, right-sizing compute/storage.
Job Description
Role Summary
Ansira is consolidating and scaling a unified, enterprise Data Lake to integrate product, media, and business data, standardize reporting, and accelerate decision-making across the organization. We are seeking a Technical Program Manager (TPM) to lead this cross-functional program end-to-end — aligning product and engineering roadmaps, driving ingestion and migration from legacy systems, maturing data governance and quality, and ensuring business adoption of standardized, self-serve analytics.
This leader will orchestrate work across Ansira’s Product solutions, Data Engineering, Data Science/BI, Media, and Client Partnership teams, with a clear mandate: deliver consistent, governed, and performant data to downstream products and reporting while deprecating redundant systems and minimizing operational cost.
What You’ll Do
Program Leadership & Delivery
- Own the multi-quarter program plan for the unified Data Lake: scope, roadmap, milestones, budgets (OPEX/CAPEX), risks, and dependencies.
- Stand up and run the operating model: weekly workstream standups, cross-functional syncs, monthly steering committee, and a transparent executive status rhythm.
- Build and maintain a single-source-of-truth for delivery: program charter, RACI, RAID log, decision log, intake/triage process, and dashboards for progress/risks.
- Drive the migration plan from legacy pipelines and tools (e.g., Alteryx, Insighter) to the target stack (e.g., Snowflake, Power BI embedded via platform connectors).
- Coordinate parallel workstreams (ingestion, modeling, governance, reporting cutover) to hit time-bound deliverables with predictable quality.
Product Management & Roadmap
- Define and maintain the Data Lake program backlog, translating business use cases into technical epics, data contracts, and acceptance criteria.
- Partner with Product and Data Science teams to standardize media and product reporting packages and ensure they’re backed by governed, contract-driven data.
- Prioritize sources and domains for ingestion based on business value, client impact, and technical feasibility; establish clear go/no-go gates.
- Align with platform architecture to ensure scalable patterns for batch/stream ELT/CDC, cost control, observability, and reusability across domains.
Data Governance, Quality, and Security
- Establish practical data contracts with upstream product and business owners; define schema, SLAs, lineage, and DQ checks at ingestion.
- Stand up governance ceremonies and roles (data owners, stewards) and implement data catalog/lineage practices to improve discoverability and trust.
- Define and monitor quality KPIs (completeness, timeliness, accuracy) and drive remediation plans with accountable teams.
- Ensure data privacy, compliance, and security best practices (e.g., PII handling, role-based access, data masking) across environments.
Stakeholder Management & Change Adoption
- Serve as the connective tissue across Product, Engineering, Data Science, Media, Finance, and Client Partnership — communicating decisions, trade-offs, and timelines.
- Lead change management for reporting standardization (e.g., Media (AdTech/LBN)-based standard reports), business onboarding to the lake, and client-facing cutovers.
- Create enablement assets (runbooks, playbooks, onboarding guides) and training plans to accelerate adoption and reduce support burden.
Technical Fluency
- Partner effectively with architects and data engineers on Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks, Azure/AWS/GCP services, orchestration (ADF/Airflow), and transformation (dbt).
- Understand ELT/CDC patterns, API/file ingestion, schema design for analytics, and BI tooling (Power BI, Looker). Write and review basic SQL for validation.
- Apply FinOps and performance/cost optimization practices (storage tiers, compute sizing, job scheduling, caching strategies).
Minimum Qualifications
- 8+ years in Program/Project/Product Management, with 5+ years leading complex data platform initiatives in a cloud environment.
- Proven delivery of cross-functional data programs involving multiple product lines and business stakeholders; strong executive communication.
- Hands-on experience with modern data stacks: one or more of Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks; Azure Data Factory/Airflow; dbt; Kafka/Kinesis; Git/Terraform; REST/SFTP integrations.
- Strong grounding in data governance and quality practices, data contracts, catalog/lineage, and secure data access.
- Demonstrated expertise in Agile at scale (Scrum/Kanban), Jira/Confluence, dependency/risk management, and budget tracking (including CAPEX/OPEX).
- Competent SQL skills for validation/triage; fluency in reading pipeline/log artifacts and interpreting BI/semantic model requirements.
Preferred Qualifications
- Background in marketing/media data and standardized performance reporting (e.g., Media (AdTech/LBN), campaign hierarchies, Power BI embedded).
- Prior experience migrating from legacy ETL/BI ecosystems (e.g., Alteryx/Insighter/Tableau) to a lakehouse with standardized semantic layers.
- Experience establishing data domains and productizing data (SLAs, contracts, versioning, lifecycle) to accelerate downstream analytics.
- Familiarity with privacy, security, and compliance standards (e.g., RBAC/ABAC, PII governance) and enterprise SSO/permissions models for embedded analytics.
- FinOps mindset: cost observability, unit economics, and right-sizing compute/storage.
Success Metrics (What Great Looks Like)
- Sources Onboarded: number of prioritized sources/domains ingested to the lake with production-grade contracts and SLAs.
- Time-to-Data: cycle time from intake approval to governed data available for downstream consumption.
- Data Quality & Reliability: sustained improvement in DQ scorecards; incident MTTR reduction; SLA adherence for freshness and availability.
- Migration Progress: percent of targeted legacy pipelines and reports decommissioned; client reporting cutovers delivered on schedule.
- Adoption & Reuse: growth in standardized reporting/package usage; reduction in ad hoc one-off pipelines.
- Cost & Performance: measurable storage/compute cost per use case; query performance improvements aligned to agreed SLOs.
30/60/90-Day Plan
- 30 Days: Confirm program charter, governance model, and delivery rhythm. Baseline current-state architecture, sources, and reporting dependencies. Publish the first integrated roadmap/milestone plan and RAID.
- 60 Days: Land 1–2 ingestion patterns as reusable templates (contracts, lineage, observability). Execute the first cutover to standardized reporting for a targeted use case. Stand up DQ scorecards and weekly KPI review.
- 90 Days: Complete a tranche of source onboardings and at least one significant reporting migration. Retire targeted legacy jobs. Publish quarterly executive readout with outcomes, cost/performance improvements, and next-wave priorities.
Tools You’ll Use
- Jira, Confluence, Power BI; Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks; Azure/AWS/GCP services (e.g., ADF, IAM); Airflow; dbt; Git; catalog/lineage tools.
Why This Role
This is a high-visibility opportunity to unify Ansira’s data foundation and materially improve the speed, quality, and consistency of insights across products and services. You will own the operating model, drive cross-functional alignment, and deliver tangible business outcomes through a modern, governed data platform.