Director of Engineering - Data Access

Engineering Denver,Colorado Seattle,Washington Memphis,Tennessee

Our team is a group of people brought together through passion and inspired by possibility. We are looking for team members who love solving problems, are motivated by challenges, and enjoy turning clever ideas into exceptional products. When you work for us, you are using Ookla data and insights to advance our mission of better connectivity for all.

We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our Data Access team - a critical function that powers our enterprise products through APIs and data systems serving ISPs and government customers worldwide. You'll oversee a team of backend and data engineers responsible for designing, scaling, and operating the infrastructure that delivers petabyte-scale telemetry and analytics data to our customers.

This role requires a technical leader who can bridge backend engineering and data infrastructure, balancing system performance with product velocity. You'll drive technical strategy, partner across product and engineering organizations, and build a team culture focused on operational excellence and customer impact.

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 10+ engineers across backend (Go, Node.js) and data engineering disciplines

Define and execute technical strategy for our data access layer, including APIs, data pipelines, and orchestration systems

Drive architectural decisions for high-throughput APIs serving analytical workloads, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance

Partner closely with product management and frontend/web application engineering teams to deliver seamless data experiences for customers

Oversee the operation and evolution of our data orchestration systems (Airflow, Dagster) and analytical databases (Single Store)

Lead development of geospatial data systems and APIs, supporting location-based analytics and network intelligence features

Build operational excellence through observability, data quality frameworks, and incident management practices

Manage team planning, roadmaps, and delivery across a portfolio of data products and infrastructure initiatives

Foster a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement

Collaborate with platform teams on data architecture evolution (S3, Athena, lakehouse patterns)

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or Engineering

10+ years of software engineering experience with 4+ years in engineering management roles

Experience leading teams of 10 or more engineers, ideally managing both backend and data engineering functions

Strong technical background in API development and distributed systems architecture

Deep understanding of data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, etc.) and their operational patterns

Experience designing APIs over analytical data stores, managing schema evolution and versioning at scale

Solid grasp of data engineering fundamentals: streaming systems, data storage formats, query optimization, and data quality

Familiarity with Go and/or Node.js in production environments (hands-on experience preferred)

Understanding of analytical databases and query engines (Single Store, Click House, Athena, Presto, Snowflake)

Experience with geospatial data systems, spatial indexing, and location-based query optimization (PostGIS, H3, geohashing)

Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, including data lake patterns and modern storage layers (S3, Iceberg, Parquet)

Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering practices for data-intensive systems

Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

Strong strategic thinking with ability to balance short-term delivery and long-term technical investment

About

Ookla ® is a global leader in connectivity intelligence, offering unparalleled network insights through the combined expertise of Speedtest ® , Downdetector ® , Root Metrics ® , and Ekahau ® . Ookla’s complementary datasets combine crowdsourced and controlled, public and private collection methods, QoS and QoE metrics, and…