VP, Head of Data

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challengeand Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

The Role
We are seeking a strategic and execution-oriented Head of Data to lead our enterprise data organization through its next stage of modernization and integration.

Reporting to the CTO and partnering closely with the CEO and Executive Leadership Team, the Head of Data will unify Data Engineering, Data Science, Revenue Analytics, and Business Intelligence into a cohesive, high-performing organization. This leader will drive architectural stabilization, governance clarity, and improved decision velocity across the company.

This is a transformation mandate grounded in pragmatic execution: stabilizing and rationalizing a fragmented data environment while delivering measurable business value along the way.

The Head of Data serves as the executive integrator across data pillars, aligning technical architecture with business priorities.

What You’ll Own

• Enterprise Data Strategy Governance and Risk

• Establish a trusted single source of truth for core enterprise metrics

• Define and execute a multi-year enterprise data roadmap spanning engineering, analytics, and science

• Align data capabilities to support marketplace growth, revenue expansion, and operational excellence

• Accountable for defining and enforcing enterprise-wide standards for data definitions, metric integrity, and stewardship across all business functions

• Own the identification and mitigation of enterprise data risks, including metric inconsistency, governance gaps, architectural fragility, and compliance exposure

• Establish clarity across departments on trusted performance indicators

Data Architectural Stabilization and Modernization

• Execute a multi-year modernization plan to democratize data consumption across the company with a high degree of confidence behind the metrics

• Deliver meaningful business utility within the first 6 months while driving long-term architectural integrity

• Rationalize a highly fragmented legacy data schema into scalable, domain-oriented models with clear sources of truth

• Establish instrumentation and data contracts that enforce trust, and support near real-time experimentation and optimization

• Establish engineering excellence standards that improve data reliability observability, and deployment rigor across the platform.

• Establish architectural foundations capable of supporting event-driven intelligence and AI readiness

Revenue Acceleration & Decision Velocity 

• Drive the evolution from static reporting to near real-time, decision-ready intelligence across marketplace performance, revenue operations, and executive KPIs

• Transition data from a reporti