Sr. Director, Platform Engineering – Consumer Data

About TEGNA

TEGNA Inc. (NYSE: TGNA) helps people thrive in their local communities by providing the trusted local news and services that matter most. With 64 television stations in 51 U.S. markets, TEGNA reaches more than 100 million people monthly across the web, mobile apps, streaming, and linear television. Together, we are building a sustainable future for local news.

The Sr Director, Data Products Engineering is a hands-on technical leader responsible for defining and executing the roadmap for our enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP). This role is critical in leveraging large-scale, real-time consumer data to engineer delightful consumer experiences, enable hyper-personalization across all touchpoints, and optimize marketing activation through advanced analytics and AI/ML models. This position provides deep technical guidance and oversight to a high-performing team of data and platform specialists, collaborating cross-functionally to maximize the CDP's potential and directly contribute to increased engagement and consumer loyalty.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and articulate a clear, actionable technical vision and roadmap for the CDP, ensuring alignment with overarching business objectives, marketing strategies, and enterprise data architecture principles. This includes defining future state capabilities, evaluating emerging technologies, and proposing scalable solutions.
• Provide end-to-end oversight into the design, development, implementation, and operational management of the CDP. This includes data ingestion pipelines (batch and streaming), ETL/ELT processes, identity resolution frameworks, segmentation, and API integrations.
• Ensure the platform's scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost-efficiency.
• Establish, implement, and enforce robust data governance policies and procedures, including metadata management, data lineage tracking, data cataloging, and data quality assurance frameworks.
• Build and mentor a high-performing, cross-functional technical team.
• Partner closely with Content, Product, Marketing, and Data Analytics teams to seamlessly integrate the CDP into core business processes and workflows.
• Drive requirements gathering of new data products and features.
• Define and implement technical strategies and processes for leveraging the CDP to drive personalized customer journeys, targeted digital marketing campaigns, audience segmentation, and advanced predictive analytics across all platforms.
• Oversee the activation of audiences across various downstream marketing and advertising platforms.
• Implement observability solutions for the CDP, providing regular technical performance reports, data insights, and strategic recommendations to executive stakeholders.
• Manage technical relationships with CDP vendors, data providers, and other technology partners.

Required Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or similar field.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in designing, building, and managing large-scale data platforms, distributed systems, and/or customer data platforms, with a strong emphasis on data-driven marketing and analytics.
• 5+ years of experience leading and managing onshore and off shore technical teams, including data engineering, data architecture, and/or AI / ML Ops functions.
• Deep technical understanding and hands-on experience with CDP platforms (e.g., RudderStack, 1Plusx), data warehousing solutions (e.g., Snowflake, Amazon Redshift), data lake architectures, and big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Hadoop).
• Proven expertise in data modeling (dimensional, relational, graph), ETL/ELT pipeline development, real-time data processing, and event-driven architecture using technologies like Kafka, Kinesis, or Flink.
• Proficiency in programming languages (e.g., Python, Scala, Java) and expert-level SQL.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment and management of data infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of identity resolution methodologies, consent management platforms, and privacy-enhancing technologies.
• Exceptional analytical, problem-solving, and system design skills.
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively with cross