Head of Data Engineering

TRANZACT is a leading direct-to-consumer insurance services business, specializing in the distribution of Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement and Life & Supplemental insurance policies. Our focus is on leveraging our highly skilled team of over 3,000 professionals to deliver innovative solutions for our insurance carrier partners and provide consumers with a best-in-class experience.

We work with some of America's largest insurance brands to attract, educate and connect with consumers. Our diverse team of analysts, writers, engineers, designers, business leads, data scientists and sales professionals all work together to create thoughtful, data-driven and effective marketing, technology, sales and servicing strategies. These efforts have resulted in TRANZACT earning recognition and winning awards from some of the biggest names in the industry.

When you become part of TRANZACT, you join a team of passionate people who push for excellence, follow through on commitments, and love to succeed together. Our culture rests on a simple principle – “Be Real” – that means being genuine, keeping your word, and having the courage to make tough decisions. Our “Be Real” values resonate and are meaningful to us.

We are entrepreneurial, fast paced and empower our people. We know how to make things happen and know that our people are always the source of our success.

We are hiring a hands‑on data engineering leader to lead and scale TRANZACT's data engineering teams and pioneer a new AI‑first data engineering discipline—accelerating the velocity, quality, and business impact of everything we build on data. You will own the architecture, delivery, governance, and security of our modern data platform built on Databricks and PostgreSQL, while embedding AI into how our teams design, build, and operate data systems.

This role combines strategic platform ownership with sleeves‑rolled‑up execution and people leadership.

• Define and evolve the end‑to‑end data platform strategy across ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving—anchored on Databricks (Lakehouse, Delta, Unity Catalog) and PostgreSQL—with production‑grade reliability and cost efficiency.
• Establish an AI‑first data engineering practice: standard patterns, SDKs, and golden paths that use AI to accelerate pipeline development, testing, documentation, and operations across teams.
• Stand up enterprise‑grade data governance and data security: cataloging, lineage, access controls, data quality, PII handling, and policy enforcement across the platform.
• Build and lead high‑performing data engineering teams—hiring, mentoring, and setting the technical bar—while driving measurable improvements in delivery velocity and platform trust.
• Uplift the broader Engineering and Data organizations by sharing reusable components, best practices, and self‑service capabilities that reduce bottlenecks and vendor dependency.
• Serve as the accountable leader for critical data initiatives, driving requirements → architecture → implementation → launch → post‑launch learning.

• Architect scalable, reliable data pipelines and platform services on Databricks and PostgreSQL, supporting batch and streaming workloads across marketing, sales, and servicing domains.
• Define and roll out an AI‑first engineering workflow—leveraging AI coding assistants, agentic tooling, and automated eval/QA gates—to accelerate data engineering outcomes without compromising quality or security.
• Establish data governance standards:
  Unity Catalog (or equivalent), lineage, data contracts, freshness and quality SLAs, and asset lifecycle management.
• Own data security posture in partnership with Security and Compliance: role‑based access, audit trails, encryption, PII/PHI handling, and regulatory alignment appropriate to insurance data.
• Set engineering standards and review designs, PRs, data models, and architecture; drive adoption through documentation and enablement.
• Lead vendor and tooling evaluation, and make build/buy/insource recommendations aligned to unit economics, reliability, and IP strategy.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop engineers; host tech…