Versant Media’s Data Platforms team is the central data store across the enterprise. We unify disparate systems into a secure, well-governed, real-time data environment that powers downstream products, analytics, and content delivery experiences.
We are seeking a Director, Platform Development to lead the design, buildout, and evolution of our modern data platform. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who is equally comfortable writing production code, setting architectural direction, and managing a small but growing team.
In the near term, this role will be a key individual contributor responsible for building foundational platform capabilities. Over time, the focus will shift toward people leadership, planning, and execution management as the team scales.
This role reports to the VP of Data Platforms and is expected to act as a technical and operational anchor for the organization.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of core backend services and data platform components using Node.js and TypeScript
- Establish and evolve platform architecture, design patterns, and engineering standards
- Own and triage intake requests, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform health
- Partner closely with governance, analytics, and downstream consumers to ensure the platform supports:
- Scalable data ingestion and access patterns
- Lakehouse-style architectures
- ELT pipelines
- Metadata, lineage, and governance requirements
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that enable safe, repeatable, and observable deployments
- Set expectations and best practices around:
- Object-oriented design and proven design patterns
- Test-driven development (TDD) and strong automated test coverage
- Secure development lifecycle (SDL) principles
- Hire, mentor, and manage engineers as the team grows
- Conduct code and design reviews, providing clear technical guidance
- Collaborate effectively in a matrixed enterprise environment with both legacy systems and modern platforms
- Gradually transition from primary IC to people and execution leadership as the platform matures