VP, Data Engineering

Company Description

Job Description 

The VP of Data Engineering will be responsible for leading the data-focused Technology, Engineering and Platform teams, whose output directly empowers business insights and decisions at A&F.

Reporting into the SVP Data &Analytics, the role will partner with a multitude of senior stakeholders to understand A&F’s technology across teams and products. This will involve determining a path forward to delivering technology that will facilitate the role data plays within our overall business strategy, with a clear focus on shepherding the quality, reliability, and accessibility of data to all partners and powering a range of services.

This leader will be accountable for building, growing, and mentoring a world-class team of data and platform engineers.

What Will You Be Doing? 

• Lead execution of data projects to support A&F’s goals and strategic initiatives.
• Build organizational technical capabilities to enable the ingestion, integration, modeling, and transformation of internal and external datasets at scale.
• Modernize Data Engineering infrastructure so that A&F can scale effectively with the rapid growth of the business globally and across franchise/third party partnerships.
• Drive the technical data strategy for the company in close alignment and partnership with the SVP of Data Analytics
• Collaborate closely with cross functional leaders within the core business, Digital & Technology, Architecture, Data and Decision Science, Security & Compliance, and operations to ensure that they can use the data as a strategic competitive advantage.
• Ensure the Data Engineering organization has the resources, capacity and skills to meet the company’s ambitious goals and meet the overarching business priorities.
• Act as a trusted advisor to the CTO leadership team in developing strategy.
• Manage costs associated with running Data infrastructure and operations.
• Ensure that the core data assets are secure and meet all regulatory requirements.
• Strengthen external partnerships as a source of talent and technical capabilities, including related to big data platform solutions.
• Build advocacy in the organization around the importance of data, data engineering best practices and data forward/thoughtful technology implementations.
• Drive performance management by communicating job expectations, monitoring performance, providing feedback and facilitating employee development.
• Maintain transparent communication by appropriately communicating organization information to team through department meetings and regular interpersonal communications.
• Lead and motivate teams to create a workplace culture consistent with the A&F leadership standards.

What Do You Need To Bring? 

• Strong experience with data technologies such as Azure, PowerBI, Snowflake, Tableau, and Databricks, among others.
• Knowledge of and hands-on ability with modern data technologies. Ability to make technology and architecture decisions and to guide the organization on best-in-class approaches.
• Track record of transforming and modernizing cloud-based technology in a data intensive space.
• Demonstrated strength in leading data strategy broadly, which includes experience with data governance, quality and security.
• 15+ years’ experience in a pivotal data leadership role which involved leading a comprehensive data strategy; experience building and managing large (80+) data engineering organizations.
• Deep experience perfecting the right processes and workflows needed to scale data and engineering organizations, while expanding into new markets and products
• Track record of recruiting and developing outstanding talent in a distributed global environment; strong management expertise and proven experience developing senior talent
• An ability to develop productive relationships access the entire organization in order drive tangible business value, with a keen focus on high impact analytics.
• Demonstrated experience in building infrastructure, platforms and data science tools/products to solve complex business problems. This includes enabling machine learning, quantitative methods, predictive modelling and other analytics technology frameworks and techniques.
• Experience in data heavy environments required; experience in consumer or retail technologies strongly preferred.
• Experience delivering value in a multi-company or agile environment is a plus as well as leading urgent/on call support teams.

Our Company 

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (A&F Co.) is a global retailer of five iconic, omnichannel lifestyle brands catering to the kid through millennial customer: Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrom