Director Data Engineering - Remote

CPI Card Group® is a payment technology company and leading provider of credit, debit and prepaid solutions delivered physically, digitally and on-demand. CPI helps our customers foster connections and build their brands through innovative and reliable solutions, including financial payment cards, personalization and fulfillment, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) instant issuance. Learn more at

The Director of Data Engineering leads CPI Card Group's data engineering function and is accountable for building, operating, and scaling the company's cloud-native Databricks Lakehouse on AWS. This role owns the people, delivery, and technology of the data platform - hiring and developing the team, setting the engineering strategy and roadmap, managing the budget and vendor relationships, and ensuring the platform reliably powers analytics, reporting, and AI across the enterprise.

Reporting to the SVP, Business Technology and Data, the Director is both a technical leader and a people leader, translating CPI's "Data-First" transformation strategy into an organized, high-performing team and a dependable production platform, while partnering with executives and functional leaders to turn data into a strategic asset.

• Team Leadership and Organizational Development (25%) - Build, lead, and develop the data engineering team, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. Establish team structure, roles, and staffing plans (including contractor-to-FTE conversion), and cultivate a high-performing, accountable engineering culture. Set objectives, allocate work, and ensure the team consistently delivers against commitments
• Data Engineering Strategy and Delivery (25%) - Own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the enterprise data platform on Databricks and AWS, including the Medallion model (Landing, Bronze Raw, Silver Standardized, Gold Consumption/Aggregates/Semantic). Prioritize the portfolio of data initiatives, manage delivery timelines and dependencies, and hold the team accountable for reliable, on-time execution that anticipates future analytics, GenAI, and agentic AI workloads.
• Platform Operations, Reliability, and Governance (20%) - Ensure the production data platform is reliable, secure, and cost-efficient, with clear SLAs, monitoring, and incident management. Oversee the governance model, including Unity Catalog administration, RBAC, data classification, lineage, and quality, ensuring compliance with SOX, PCI-DSS, and other regulatory obligations in partnership with the Data Governance Council and security leadership.
• Budget, Vendor, and Stakeholder Management (15%) - Own the data engineering budget, including cloud spend, tooling, and consulting partners. Lead vendor evaluation, selection, and management, and make build-vs-buy and platform investment decisions. Partner with functional executives to align the roadmap to business priorities, and present strategy, progress, risks, and investment recommendations to senior and executive leadership.
• Technical Direction and Standards (15%) - Set the engineering standards, reference architectures, and best practices the team follows, including Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), monorepo CI/CD (Git Lab), and pipeline design patterns (PySpark, Delta).
• Provide senior technical direction and design review, guiding the Data Architect and engineers and serving as an escalation point for the hardest technical problems.
• Sponsor enterprise master data management (MDM), including the Unique Customer  (UCID) program.
• Ensure the data platform and migration strategy support the future Acumatica ERP implementation.
• Champion the company's AI enablement agenda, including reusable data/AI platform capabilities and AI…