Director of Engineering - Data Access

Description

Position at Ookla

The Opportunity:

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. We actively invest in engineering productivity, including AI-assisted development tools, and expect leaders who are curious about how to make their teams more effective. What makes this role different? Today, the team consists of 15 engineers who report directly to you.

There is currently no management layer underneath. Your first priority will be hands-on engineering leadership - setting technical direction, running the team, owning delivery, and earning trust. Over time, you'll identify where to split the team and develop the first engineering manager underneath you. If you want to build an org, not inherit one, this is the role.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers across backend software and data engineering disciplines
• Own delivery execution - bring clarity to priorities, remove blockers, and ensure the team ships reliably
• Invest in individual growth - run meaningful 1:1s, support career development, and advocate for your team
• 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)
• Build operational excellence through observability, data quality frameworks, and incident management practices
• Lead development of geospatial data systems and APIs, supporting location-based analytics and network intelligence features

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in engineering management roles
• Experience directly managing 8 or more engineers, ideally across both backend and data engineering functions
• Track record of growing a team - scaling headcount, introducing structure, or splitting a team as it matured
• Strong technical background in API development and distributed systems architecture
• Deep understanding of data pipeline orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, 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, Python and SQL in production environments (hands-on experience preferred)
• Understanding of analytical databases and query engines (Single Store, Athena, Presto)
• Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering practices for data-intensive systems
• Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, including data lake patterns and modern storage layers (S3, Iceberg, Parquet)

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 more to unlock correlations and actionable insights — helping organizations optimize networks, enhance digital experiences, and create better connected experiences for end-users.

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.

Ziff Davis (NASDAQ: ZD) is a vertically focused digital media and internet company whose portfolio includes leading brands in technology, shopping, gaming and entertainment, connectivity, health, cybersecurity, and martech. Today, Ziff Davis is focused on seven key verticals – Technology, Connectivity, Shopping, Entertainment, Health & Wellness, Cybersecurity and Marketing Technology. Its brands include IGN, Mashable, Retail Me Not , PCMag, Humble Bundle, Spiceworks, Ookla…