Principal Data Strategist

Overview:
Chick-fil-A is looking for a Principal Data Strategist to revolutionize the Customer Technology Solutions (CTS) commerce product portfolio. In this role, you will collaborate with over 30 agile product teams to ensure seamless operational data management and gain invaluable insights into business performance. By utilizing advanced analytics and machine learning to enhance efficiency and responsiveness, you'll help drive the adoption of cutting-edge solutions across multiple Customer Technology ecosystems.

 

By leading the charge of data-centric design principles, operational data flow pipelines, and facilitate organization-wide analytics and data utilization, this role presents an exhilarating chance to drive substantial change within a dynamic environment.

Product-oriented Operational Data Management
You will own data-oriented design and operating standards for the entire commerce portfolio in the domains of data persistence, caching and global distribution, REST API design and best practices, data access control and authorization, data movement and transformation, and other product-oriented data management considerations. This aspect of the role will require skills articulating and driving adoption of a clear strategy that is aligned with adjacent strategies and requirements from peers and stakeholder groups across the enterprise. You will have significant influence over solution architectures across the portfolio for products interacting with customer and transaction data. You will also be responsible for operating and supporting operational data movement pipelines (via queues, batch data movement jobs, event-driven flows, etc.) that support commerce use cases, as distinct from enterprise analytics needs. This responsibility will entail overseeing managed service providers and ensuring capacity and service levels meet business needs and defined service level objectives.

Enterprise-wide Analytics and Data Consumption
You will partner with enterprise stakeholders to define a comprehensive strategy supporting enterprise analytics needs. The strategy will articulate solution architecture patterns providing secure and scalable interfaces between commerce products and enterprise data collections. You will educate product teams, advocate for standards and patterns that support enterprise data access needs and help teams with implementation by brokering engagements to augment team capacity. Additionally, you will help define operational processes and service levels for data movement, and partner with product teams to ensure that operational data sources are available, accurate, and perform adequately to meet enterprise needs and service levels. You will also be responsible for procuring and overseeing outside services tasked with maintaining and operating current-state data movement solutions while product teams migrate to new solution architecture patterns and processes.

Innovative Event Processing Architecture
You will help define and implement a high-scale, real-time event processing architecture supporting integration with decision models driven by machine learning. Success will require close partnership and alignment with stakeholder groups and emerging centers of excellence across the enterprise, as well as partnership with outside service providers. Not only will you help define and iterate a strategy for this new capability and help product teams implement it, but you will also drive the strategy that includes the standards for stream-oriented and publish-subscribe consumption patterns, schemas for events, and solutions for operations and support at scale.

Formalization of Data-oriented Responsibilities
This role formalizes and centralizes a broad set of data-oriented responsibilities and processes that have been either undefined or ad hoc in nature to date. The ideal candidate has the relevant skills and experience to lead the organization on a multi-stage journey in all areas of responsibility, managing multiple concurrent streams of activity, driving effective change within and across the organization, influencing multiple technology and business strategies, and leading staff and partners through influence. This role is an individual contribution role with no supervisory responsibilities but has the potential to take on people leadership if emergent strategies and tactics create business needs for additional staff roles.

While compliance with laws and regulations around data access and usage will not be a primary responsibility for this role, you will consult with stakeholders focused on compliance and ensure that the requirements and visibility necessary for compliance are supported across the portfolio in every area.

Our Flexible Future model offers a healthy mix of working in person and virtually, strengthening key elements of the Chick-fil-A culture by fostering collaboration and community. 

Responsibilities:
Aligns with enterprise data and analytics teams, technologies, processes and strategies, applying them appropriately within the consumer-oriented commerce domain and validating variations and new data solution patterns to maintain ongoing alignment.

Defines best practices, sets standards, and selects or endorses platforms and/or languages for data persistence, caching, transformation, movement, and modeling. Influences technology strategy in these same areas.

Understands and helps product teams understand the regulatory and legal obligations influencing data storage, access, and use within the consumer-oriented commerce domain.

Documents and advances portfolio-wide REST API standards of all kinds, including naming and semantics, authentication, access control and scoping, versioning, and documentation.

Brokers and maintains event schemas and standards for stream-oriented and publish/subscribe solution patterns involving multiple products or product teams.

Consults with teams in the consumer-oriented commerce domain to assist with data-oriented solution architecture decisions involving operational data storage, caching, event publication/consumption, transformation, publication to the enterprise, and analytics.

Guides teams toward standardization of data and analytics operations and support activities, preferring enterprise and departmental solutions over local solutions.

Evangelizes and educates product teams on topics of data security, design, performance, best practices, and standards.

Helps identify and drive resolution of performance, reliability, and recoverability issues arising from data access, data movement, and data transformation activities.

Selects and oversees outside partners and professionals to effectively deliver outcomes and results.

May take on people leadership and budgetary responsibility as this space grows.

Minimum Qualifications:
Experience working with diverse stakeholders to gather input and drive product strategy

Proven track record of designing, deploying, and supporting large scale distributed computing systems in a mission critical environment

Experience with Amazon Web Services or equivalent cloud platforms

Knowledge of REST API architecture and design principles including best practices for authentication, encryption, access control, and data compliance

Familiarity with large-scale analytics and data warehouse systems and/or data lake architectures

Familiarity with common data persistence options including relational, key/value, and object stores.

Experience in prioritiziong multiple competing demands

Experience in building partnerships and collaborating with internal stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with large-scale analytics and data warehouse systems like Databricks, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, and Hadoop

Knowledge of various data persistence technologies, including relational databases (e.g., Oracle, Postgres), non-relational/NoSQL databases (e.g., DynamoDB, MongoDB), cloud storage (e.g., AWS S3, GCP Object Storage), and traditional file systems

Experience with caching concepts, technologies, and solutions like Redis and Memcached

Experience with message queueing and event streaming concepts and solutions, including SNS, SQS, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka

Demonstrated ability to select and manage service providers for delivering product outcomes through external relationships

Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including SNS, SQS, Redshift, RDS Postgres, DynamoDB, Aurora, EKS, and other cloud services

Experience in implementing REST APIs, including authentication, encryption, access control, versioning, and compliance, with expertise in REST API documentation tools like Swagger

Experience leading teams with multiple areas of focus and responsibility

Familiarity with CDN and network traffic mitigation solutions such as Cloudflare and Cloudfront

Familiarity with data movement and transformation solutions (ETL/ELT), such as Informatica and Oracle Data Integrator

Minimum Years of Experience:
8

Travel Requirements:
10%

Required Level of Education:
Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Level of Education:
Masters Degree

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