Director, Data Acquisition

Datassential is a leading global intelligence platform for the food and beverage industry. Leveraging billions of data points and cutting-edge AI, we provide a suite of innovative solutions that empower more than 90% of the world’s largest food and beverage brands to develop, market, and sell their products more effectively.

Based in Chicago, USA, Datassential has expanded its global reach through strategic acquisitions of CHD Expert (France) in 2022 and Brizo Data, Inc. in 2025. In 2024, we secured investment from top-tier private equity firms New Mountain Capital and Endicott Capital - a milestone that fuels our accelerated product roadmap and strengthens our research and development, enabling us to deliver even greater value to our clients.

Our remote-first, globally distributed team thrives on diverse perspectives and deep expertise in the food and beverage space. Food brings people together—and at Datassential’s table, there’s room for everyone.

Data is the foundation for everything we deliver at Datassential, and expanding and improving our data sources is of central strategic importance to our company and the customers we serve, who include some of the biggest brands in the food industry. Food service is a complex and nuanced data landscape, and you will have the opportunity to think creatively about how to expand the insights we can deliver on a global basis.

We are passionate about data, committed to doing the work well, and have a 'we can do anything' attitude. We value work-life balance, and you will be joining a team and company that wants you to grow.

• An experienced data management professional and team leader who is equally comfortable in multiple modes of work: guiding a data acquisition roadmap, managing vendor relationships, and ensuring operational rigor in a multi-faceted data-centric business
• A detail-oriented mind with an eye for continuous improvement and optimizing quality and efficiency
• An adept communicator and negotiator, able to drive conversations that span the technical, legal, and financial, and recognize and explain the business value of data
• Energized by the challenge of building data assets that expose new insights to customers and drive new product value
• Curious and energized at the prospect of working in the food industry and impacting strategic decisions for some of the world’s largest food and beverage brands
• Actively engaged and curious about AI and LLM applications in day-to-day work as well as in data extraction and process automation
• Willing to mentor and share knowledge, you make the people around you better

The Director, Data Acquisition will lead the sourcing and collection of data to support Datassential applications, research, and insights analysis globally. Reporting to the SVP of Data Strategy, this role will include management of data collection across a variety of forms and collection channels, including data collected directly via internal scraping operations as well as from external third party service and providers.

You will guide and collaborate with Datassential's senior leadership to define strategies for building proprietary data assets in support of company objectives. You will follow through on these strategies by identifying and championing new data sources, managing negotiations of terms with new third party providers, and working with Product, Engineering, and Data Operations teams to coordinate data onboarding and ingestion. You will manage data vendor and partnership relationships, ensuring that requirements for downstream use are met, and lead corrective actions as well as innovation efforts to ensure quality and efficiency of collected data.

As a hands-on data…