Head of Data Strategy / Chief Data Officer Director / VP

ClarityPay is undertaking a transformative approach to our data strategy, tech stack, and data products and platforms. We are looking for a Head of Data Strategy to architect and build our future state.

This is not a traditional, hands-off executive role. We possess a data infrastructure that requires significant upliftment to meet the demands of our scale. We need a visionary leader who is equally passionate about writing code as they are about defining strategy.

You will lead the migration from a legacy setup to a modern, scalable AWS ecosystem, establishing the data governance, MLOps, and AIOps frameworks that will allow us to become a truly data and intelligence driven operations organization.

You will be a catalyst for our healthy and growing business, taking ownership of the entire data lifecycle-from ingestion to insight to automated decision-making.

- Data Strategy & Transformation: Define and execute the roadmap to modernize our data architecture. You will lead the transition from suboptimal legacy systems to a best-in-class cloud environment, ensuring our infrastructure supports hyper-scale analytics and real-time ML inference.

- Infrastructure Engineering (Hands-on): Architect and implement a robust data lakehouse solution using the AWS ecosystem (S3, Glue, Redshift/Athena), and potentially onboard Databricks. You will ensure the pipes are clean, reliable, near real-time, and scalable.

- MLOps & AIOps Leadership: Build the rails for our models to run on. You will design the CI/CD pipelines for Machine Learning (using tools like SageMaker), ensuring that our underwriting and operational models can be deployed, monitored, and retrained with minimal friction.

- Data Governance & Quality: Establish the "rules of the road." You will implement rigorous data governance standards, ensuring data lineage, security, and quality control are baked into the architecture, not added as an afterthought.

- Operationalizing Intelligence: Champion scientific rigor in data-driven decision-making. Work with Operations, Technology, and Product to embed data signals directly into our operational workflows, moving the company from "reporting on the past" to "predicting the future."

- Team Leadership: Recruit and mentor a team of high-performing data engineers and ML engineers. We believe in empowering our people to be successful, and you will foster a culture of technical excellence and curiosity.

- Experience: 5+ years in Data Engineering or ML Engineering, with at least 4+ years in a leadership role scaling data platforms.

- Technical Mastery (AWS): Deep, hands-on experience with AWS Sagemaker, Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, and Redshift. You should be comfortable discussing partition strategies in S3 one minute and presenting to the Board the next.

- Strong Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python, Spark, Distributing Computing, and SQL is non-negotiable. You must be able to create, maintain, audit code and contribute to the repository when necessary.

- MLOps Expertise: Proven experience building Machine Learning Operations pipelines. You understand the complexities of model drift, feature stores, and inference latency, in additional to Bayesian approaches to uncertainty.

- Governance Mindset: Experience implementing data governance frameworks in a regulated industry (FinTech/Banking) is highly preferred.

- Builder Spirit: You thrive in environments where the path isn't fully paved. You enjoy the challenge of taking a "suboptimal" infrastructure and turning it into a competitive advantage.

- High Impact: You will have the unique opportunity to shape the data strategy from the ground up at a company with a very healthy core business and tremendous runway.

- Collaborative Culture: We are a collaborative team and genuinely enjoy working with each other. You will work side-by-side with the C-Suite to drive the business forward.

- Innovation: We are building a product that reimagines the way merchants serve their customers through embedded financing, and your data strategy will be the engine that powers that vision.

Salary Range: $175K - $250K per year, based on experience and qualifications.