Director, Analytics

About the Opportunity

Direct Travel is in the midst of a defining data transformation, and this role sits at the center of it. We are seeking a Director of Analytics — a hands-on technical leader who will own the strategic direction, architecture, and delivery of our global analytics platform. This platform serves both internal stakeholders and thousands of clients worldwide, making it one of the most visible and impactful investments the company is making.

This is not a role for someone who manages from a distance. We need a leader who has personally built and shipped data products — someone who has architected pipelines, modeled semantic layers, stood up embedded analytics applications, and knows what it takes to deliver production-grade analytics at scale. You will lead a team of analytics engineers who work across the full data lifecycle: from raw data ingestion and warehouse architecture to semantic modeling, self-service reporting, and bespoke client-facing data products.

The right candidate has a demonstrable track record of delivering both internal and externally facing analytics products, understands the engineering rigor required to operate a multi-tenant analytics platform, and can recruit, mentor, and elevate a high-caliber team while continuing to provide deep technical guidance.

 

What You Will Own

Analytics Platform Strategy & Delivery

• Define and execute the multi-year roadmap for Direct Travel’s global analytics platform, ensuring it serves internal business intelligence needs and external client reporting at scale.
• Drive the end-to-end delivery of analytics data products — from pipeline architecture through warehouse design, semantic modeling, and reporting enablement — with a focus toward production quality and reliability.
• Own the architecture of embedded analytics applications that integrate directly into our product experiences, providing clients with self-service access to travel data insights.
• Establish and enforce standards for data lifecycle management, ensuring clean handoffs from raw ingestion to curated data marts to governed analytics consumption layers.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as a senior technical authority on analytics architecture decisions, including warehouse design (Snowflake, Azure DataLake), semantic modeling (LookML, dbt), and BI platform strategy (Looker, Power BI).
• Provide hands-on guidance on query performance tuning, pipeline optimization, cloud cost management, and system-level diagnostics across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Lead the design of bespoke data products that integrate analytics and business intelligence platforms in an embedded manner — not just dashboards, but analytics capabilities woven into core product functionality.
• Champion modern analytics engineering practices: version-controlled transformations (dbt), Git-based BI content lifecycle management, CI/CD for data pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code deployments.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging tools and methodologies, ensuring the team stays current without chasing trends at the expense of stability.

Team Building & Leadership

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of analytics engineers who operate across the full stack: data pipelines, warehouse architecture, semantic modeling, embedded analytics, and visualization.
• Create an engineering culture rooted in technical excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement — where team members are expected to understand the systems they build end-to-end.
• Recruit top-tier analytics engineering talent, with a sharp eye for candidates who combine deep SQL and Python proficiency with cloud platform fluency and a product-oriented mindset.
• Establish clear career ladders, growth paths, and technical mentorship programs that retain and develop exceptional engineers.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration between analytics engineering, software engineering, product management, and business stakeholders.

Data Governance & Operations

• Implement and enforce governance frameworks across all analytics data products, including role-based access controls, data lineage, data quality monitoring, and compliance with regulatory requirements (GDPR, SOC 2, PCI where applicable).