Director, Data Platform, Analytics

The Director, Data Platform, Analytics & Reporting is a strategic, senior data and technology leadership role within American Public Education, Inc's (APEI) enterprise Data & Analytics leadership team. In this role you are responsible for defining the details of and executing on the enterprise analytics strategy, building and scaling the enterprise data platform, ensuring secure, reliable, and cost-efficient delivery of data for analytics, AI/ML, and operational use cases. This includes achieving the right balance of self-service analytics empowerment with trusted, governed, certified dashboards and reports. This role owns the strategy, architecture, and execution of data transformation (ELT) pipelines, orchestration, and platform services. You and your team own the delivery of analytics data products through scalable and interactive certified dashboards, robust self-service analytics data models, consultative partnerships, and operational/reporting.

The Director, Data Platform, Analytics & Reporting is also responsible for leading analyses and leading/influencing key management discussions on strategic items impacting the business such as enrollment, retention, financial impacts of new regulations, and pricing decisions. Analyzing data and driving business insights and results is common in the areas of financial planning, enrollment, retention, academic outcomes and other areas as requested.

The Director, Data Platform, Analytics & Reporting partners closely with business leaders at all levels. This partnership includes influencing Senior Management, ensuring they are empowered for data-driven decision making, and analytic products are aligned with organizational objectives and driving business impact. This also includes partnering closely with other analytics teams, technology product delivery teams, data management and governance, and data science, through all aspects of collaborative delivery. The overall strategy and data analytics platform must support enabling self-service analytics, conversational analytics (with AI), robust AI/ML, data privacy compliance, and certified data product development.

Responsibilities:

• Define the details of and execute the data platform & analytics strategy, aligned to business objectives and overall data/analytics senior leadership vision and strategy.
• Collaborate on the roadmap with data & analytics product management and owns delivery of roadmap.
• Build and lead high-performing data, data platform, analytics, and compliance/operational reporting team.
• Drive cloud-native batch ELT architecture and event-driven ingestion patterns.
• Design and implement processes and systems for regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) in partnership with the Data Management & Governance team.
• Establish platform governance for performance, cost optimization, and security compliance.
• Drives design and implementation of scalable, resilient data pipelines for batch and streaming workloads.
• Oversee data modeling standards (e.g. dimensional, Data Vault) and enforce best practices for schema evolution.
• Ensure observability, lineage, and quality frameworks are embedded in pipelines and orchestration.
• Implement data quality SLAs, monitoring, and incident response processes.
• Enable self-service analytics and data product development through delivering analytic ready data including robust BI semantic models/certified datasets.
• Evaluate and create adoption strategies around relevant emerging technologies.
• Foster a culture of automation and reliability.
• Owns budgeting and forecasting for the data & analytics platform along with vendor and partner management.
• Plans work and team capacity with peer leaders and data product owners/management.
• Create consistent framework for analytics and reporting across all business units with clear understanding of definitions and measures.
• Interacts, consults with and influences senior management at various levels of the organization, with various internal organizations (e.g. management, finance, academics, operations, legal).
• Act as liaison between the business operations and available data, working on various initiatives to maintain visibility and understanding of the data and decisions being made.
• Ensure timely and accurate development of analytics solutions as well as fulfilling ad hoc analytics needs for leadership.
• Collaborate with Architecture and Engineering team for data acquisition/ingestion.
• Mentor the team and data/analytics/reporting leads and develop succession plans.
• Demonstrate staff planning and assessment skills, and strong leadership skills including consensus-building, conflict resolution, motivation and decision-making.
• Present findings, analyses, and recommendations to team and senior management.
• Promote identification of best practices and fosters cross functional sharing of initiatives, innovation and best practices.
• Drive strong success metric definition and adherence including analytic stakeholder satisfaction on consultative and delivery efforts, increasing adoption of self-service, rationalizing and reducing report sprawl to improve user and adoption of analytical best practices and standards, platform reliability, time to analytic ready data, time to first pipeline, cost efficiency, and adoption of architectural and platform standards.

Requirements:

• 12+ years in data and analytics roles with increasing influence and leadership responsibilities around data platform/engineering, data platform architecture, analytics, and operational/compliance reporting.
• 7+ years in analytics and data leadership including leading design and delivery of enterprise data warehouse / lakehouse platform and enterprise analytical data products and solutions.
• Bachelor of Science in Business, Analytics, Information Technology, Computer Science, or equivalent with Master's in Data/Analytics related degree preferred.
• Proven experience with cloud data and analytics platforms with Snowflake, Power BI, Azure and or similar ELT pipeline and orchestration tools highly preferred .
• Deep expertise in SQL and Python as well as ELT patterns.
• Experience with streaming/event-driven architectures.
• Implemented data ops practices including automation and CI/CD data/analytics pipelines.
• Proven experience managing and delivering a wide variety of reporting and analytic solutions to internal and external stakeholders.
• Knowledge of data quality frameworks, lineage tools, MDM tools, and observability platforms
• Strong experience with leading globally distributed remote teams including employees and contract delivery teams.
• Solid planning, priority setting, product and project management skills with demonstrated experience managing multiple projects and cross functional teams concurrently.
• Strong process improvement skills & initiative to always seek improvements.
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills alongside creative thinking and innovative approaches within a strategic and broad perspective.
• Broad conceptual judgment, initiative, and must possess theoretical thinking skills.
• Track record of delivering large-scale, mission-critical data platforms with measurable business impact.
• Strategic thinking with ability to translate business goals into platform capabilities.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and influence across business and technology.
• Build talent: proven ability to attract, develop, motivate, and retain top data and analytics talent.
• Strong experience modernizing and maturing an enterprise data platform, analytics, and reporting team and practices along with establishing a culture of continuous improvement.
• In depth knowledge of architectural best practices for cloud data platforms, BI/Analytics and semantic modeling, design patterns for self-service analytics and scalable BI, governance and security principles.
• Knowledge of data governance frameworks and compliance requirements preferred.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to communicate and lead effectively with all levels of the organization from analysts to C-Level executives.
• Strong financial acumen for cost optimization and FinOps in cloud environment.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

About Us:

Online, on campus and in the workplace, we provide higher education and training to our country's heroes – military service members, veterans, nurses, government employees, and motivated professionals that want to make a difference. American Public Education, Inc. educates service-minded students, ranging from the military, public service, federal agencies, and nursing communities, through American Public University System (APUS), Hondros College of Nursing (HCON), and Rasmussen University.

It is the policy of American Public Education, Inc. (APEI) to afford equal opportunity to all qualified persons.  We treat all qualified individuals equally as to their recruitment, hiring, assignments, advancements, compensation, and all other terms and conditions of employment. American Public Education, Inc. does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, or physical, mental, or sensory disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you are a resident of a state with designated pay transparency requirements and this role is available remotely, you may be eligible to receive additional information about the compensation and benefits for this role, which we will provide upon request.  Please send an email to