Senior Director
ABOUT MPG
Market Performance Group (MPG) is a leading end-to-end, strategy & services omnichannel commerce agency focused on creating the best PATH FORWARD — from market strategy to in-market reality — for today’s fastest-growing consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. Over the years, we’ve built a strong reputation as a trusted partner and valuable resource to a broad range of companies, from Fortune 500 to Private Equity, in categories that include health & wellness, food & beverage, home and hardlines. We revel in the opportunity to guide our clients on their path forward, building and activating strategies that ensure success. Everything we do is driven by our unrelenting commitment to leverage our deep operational experience, unparalleled omnichannel expertise, and industry relationships to drive performance in today’s dynamic omnichannel marketplace.
At MPG, we value our people and their contributions; they are critical to building the MPG Brand. Our leadership team has significant experience driving topline revenue and bottom-line profit, having held senior operating roles at leading CPG manufacturers and retailers. Our highly regarded, seasoned team of 400+ strategy and commercialization professionals brings strong operational experience and a collaborative approach. All team members are singularly focused on providing clients with pragmatic, real-world market approaches, built on the strong consumer, category and marketplace insights needed to create sustainable, profitable brand growth.
Position Overview
MPG is seeking a Head of Data Engineering to lead the development and evolution of our enterprise data platform. This role will be responsible for building a scalable, reliable data infrastructure that supports both internal business operations and client-facing data products.
As a hands-on technical leader, you will own the data engineering strategy, architecture, and standards while building and managing a growing team of engineers. This is an opportunity to shape a developing function from the ground up, drive technical decisions, and establish the foundation for how data is managed and leveraged across the organization.
The ideal candidate brings a combination of deep technical expertise, strategic leadership, and a willingness to roll up their sleeves to solve complex challenges in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
Reports to the Head of Product & Technology. Based in the United States.
What you own
The platform and its architecture
- Own the data platform end to end: ingestion, warehouse design, transformation and modelling layers, semantic and serving layers, and the enterprise lake on Snowflake
- Turn business strategy into a platform roadmap, sequenced so the highest-leverage foundations land first
- Make the build-versus-buy calls on orchestration, catalog, governance and BI tooling, with a bias toward a lean, well-understood stack
- Set the standards for modelling, testing, documentation, review and release, and hold the team to them
The team
- Hire and lead three senior data engineers, and grow the function from there
- Run delivery: break down the roadmap, plan the work, unblock people, and be accountable for outcomes rather than tickets
- Be the single owner of the data platform, so it can be delegated and trusted
- Represent data engineering to product, platform engineering and business stakeholders, and turn what they need into a prioritized plan
Retailer scaling
This is the part that decides whether the platform works commercially.
- Own how new retailer data sources get onboarded, and the sequence in which they land
- Build ingestion as a repeatable operating system rather than a series of one-off integrations, so adding a retailer does not mean adding a person
- Work with partner data sources where they carry a retailer, and build and maintain our own connectors where they do not
- Own the harmonization layer across retailers, so the same question returns a comparable answer regardless of where the data came from
Data that serves machines as well as people
- Model data for two demanding consumers at once: business users who run the company on your numbers, and AI systems whose usefulness depends directly on clean grain, clear semantics and machine-readable metadata
- Define what agent-ready data means here in practice: freshness guarantees, lineage, column-level documentation, and guardrails against ambiguous or misleading fields
- Own reliability, performance and cost as analytical and AI-driven workloads grow on Snowflake
Governance, trust and operations
- Establish the data quality and governance frameworks that make business-critical numbers trusted by default
- Set access, security and data-contract standards across the lake, and make sure they are followed rather than documented
- Build the operational muscle so the platform is dependable without heroics: monitoring, alerting, SLAs and SLOs, incident response and runbooks
- Support the compliance program, including SOC 2 and retailer data certifications, which gate how fast we can scale
What we are looking for
Someone who has built and scaled a data engineering function, and who thinks in pipelines that survive rather than pipelines that ship.
Required
- 8+ years in engineering, several of them in data or analytics engineering, including time as the most senior data person in the room
- A track record of owning a data platform or major data domain end to end: architecture, delivery and standards, not just individual pipelines
- Experience leading and hiring engineers, and building a function rather than joining one
- Expert, production-grade Snowflake: architecture, performance, warehouse and cost management, security and access control
- Deep dbt expertise at scale: modular model design, testing, documentation, macros, CI, and opinions on how a project should be structured and governed
- Strong command of managed ingestion and the judgment to know its limits and when to build custom in Python against APIs and event feeds
- Solid warehousing and dimensional modelling foundations, and the judgment to know when to bend them
- Experience defining engineering standards, version control, CI/CD, environments and testing, and getting a team to actually adopt them
- Comfort working directly with executives, making decisions and defending them, and operating with autonomy
Nice to have
- Experience with retail, CPG or e-commerce data: point-of-sale, syndicated data such as Circana or NIQ, retailer portals, digital shelf, pricing and promotion
- Experience building data for AI or LLM-powered applications: retrieval, semantic layers, tool use
- Experience standing up a data function from an early stage, where you set the standards rather than inheriting them
- Familiarity with governance, cataloging and lineage tooling
- Familiarity with Postgres or other operational databases feeding analytical platforms
Why this role is interesting
This is a founder-level mandate for data engineering without the founder title. You are not inheriting a mature platform and a backlog, and you are not one senior voice among many. You decide how MPG builds, governs and serves data, and you get the autonomy that goes with it.
The work runs in two directions at once. The business runs on the numbers you produce, and what we take to market is built on the data layer you design. Both get harder and more interesting with every data source we add
If you want ownership of a platform that matters, the room to make the calls, and a team to build it with, this is that role.
Compensation
The expected base salary range for this position is $200,000 - $250,000 annually, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications. In addition to base salary, this position may be eligible for performance-based bonuses and other compensation programs.
Benefits
MPG offers a generous package of health benefits, including medical, dental, vision, STD/LTD, paid maternity/paternity leave and life insurance. Our compensation program provides market industry base salary, bonuses, and 401K. In addition to paid holidays, we reward an employee’s extra efforts through unlimited paid time off.
Diversity and Inclusion
MPG provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
We are committed to ensuring that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI&B) are at the foundation of our culture. Through DEI&B, we embrace the beauty in all of the unique qualities of our employees, communities and clients. MPG’s DEI&B efforts empower us to collectively reach our full potential by fueling innovation, connection, and growth. We recognize the value of having a diverse and engaged team. We are an organization driven by PEOPLE. Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging was born from our core values. We believe that by leveraging the unique perspectives and experiences of our employees, MPG can unlock more comprehensive, innovative, and long-standing results for both our client and retailer partners. As our journey continues to evolve, we have made intentional commitments to further champion DEI&B. The foundation of our pledge starts with our promise to each other, our clients, and the community.
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