Director, Data Platform

About the role

The Director of Data Platform will own the end to end lifecycle of data across Polymarket, shaping how information moves from raw events into trusted decision intelligence. You will be responsible for designing the central nervous system that allows the company to measure, understand, and act on its most critical questions. This role requires deep architectural judgment and the ability to translate ambiguous product goals into reliable data products. You will ensure that every team, from risk to marketing, can rely on the same coherent view of reality. The position demands equal parts technical depth and organizational empathy, as you guide engineers and analysts through fast evolving requirements. You will build not just pipelines but a shared language for data quality and ownership across the organization. Ultimately, this role is about enabling the company to move with speed and confidence by making data infrastructure feel effortless to use.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and develop a team of data engineers, analytics engineers, and data scientists, defining career paths and crafting a high performing culture.
• Own the end to end architecture of the data platform, balancing immediate needs with long term scalability and simplicity.
• Establish and enforce standards for data modeling, testing, documentation, freshness expectations, and incident response across all datasets.
• Partner closely with instrumentation and on-chain engineering teams to design ingestion strategies that capture essential events before they are missed.
• Collaborate with analytics leadership and business stakeholders to sequence platform investments that unlock the highest value analyses and decisions.
• Evaluate and select tools across orchestration, transformation, warehousing, and visualization, balancing cost, performance, and operational complexity.
• Anticipate scaling bottlenecks by modeling data growth scenarios and capacity requirements ahead of product launches.
• Create an operating model for the data team including cadence for planning, on call rotation, code review, and knowledge sharing.
• Champion the build versus buy analysis for data infrastructure, making pragmatic choices that keep the platform maintainable and affordable.
• Translate business questions into data structures and pipelines that surface insight quickly without sacrificing rigor.
• Mentor senior analysts and engineers, elevating the quality of SQL, data models, and experiments across the organization.
• Drive adoption of new data products by reducing friction in the developer experience and surfacing clear patterns for common use cases.
• Measure the health of the data platform through reliability metrics, user feedback, and time to insight for key decisions.
• Serve as the primary technical spokesperson for the data platform, aligning expectations and communicating tradeoffs clearly.

Requirements

• Bring 10 or more years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data science, including at least 4 years of people management.
• Demonstrate comfort leading a multi disciplinary data team where engineers and data scientists have different working styles and definitions of done.
• Possess a strong technical foundation that allows you to review data models, architecture proposals, and query plans to improve them.
• Have production experience with modern data tools including orchestration such as Airflow, transformation tools like dbt or Spark, and a cloud warehouse such as Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, or ClickHouse.
• Show a track record of elevating data quality in environments where numbers were previously unreliable, with the judgment to choose fixes that meaningfully increase trust.
• Prove ability to prioritize across competing stakeholders and communicate no with clear reasoning that others can accept.
• Have a history of building and growing data teams, not only inheriting an established group.
• Operate effectively in a fast moving environment where business logic changes frequently and you must keep pace without sacrificing quality.
• Be based in New York or willing to relocate to New York within a reasonable timeframe.
• Be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.
• Have experience shipping data infrastructure that supports high impact decisions in regulated or financially sensitive contexts.
• Have deep familiarity with cost management and performance tuning for cloud data platforms over sustained periods.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with on-chain data ingestion or blockchain infrastructure.
• Experience supporting finance or regulatory reporting where accuracy is non negotiable.
• Background in fintech, crypto, prediction markets, or other data intensive financial products.

Practical notes

Full time role located in New York. This role reports to the executive leadership team and requires comfort with fast execution and ambiguous problem spaces.