Associate Director, Data Engineering

Brainlabs is the media agency built to answer one question: what's actually driving profit? Founded in 2012 by Daniel Gilbert, we were built by engineers before we were a media agency. Today, 1,000+ Brainlabbers across five continents use our proprietary agents, built on 32 media tools and over 2,500 logged experiments, to help brands connect every channel they plan and buy to one thing: the bottom line.

Compensation

: We hire candidates across our US office locations and at varying levels of experience.

determined once a candidate’s background and location are confirmed. Work Authorization: Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship or continuation for this position.

What's the role We are looking for a data engineer that will set the direction for how data is built at Brainlabs, not just how it's delivered on a given project. You'll lead a team of data engineers, own the technical standards the practice works to, and be the person clients and internal stakeholders rely on when the architectural decisions get hard. You'll still get into the work where it matters, but your primary leverage is through the people and systems you build So, tell me about the company Brainlabs is culture-first.

You’ve probably heard other companies describe themselves as people, clients, or profit first – but we see people, clients and profit as the building blocks of our ecosystem. Culture powers all three and we know that when the ecosystem is balanced, we all win! That's why the culture we cultivate is a culture of winning together.

To learn more about what it’s like to be a Brainlabber, check out our culture code. What you do Define and own the data engineering capability roadmap for NAMER, setting standards for how pipelines are designed, maintained, and scaled across the practice. Lead and develop a team of data engineers, providing technical direction, career development support, and hands-on guidance on complex problems.

Architect scalable, production-grade data solutions on GCP, covering the full stack from ingestion and transformation through to warehousing and serving layers in BigQuery. Own the quality bar for data engineering output across the team, including pipeline reliability, query performance, data quality frameworks, and documentation standards.

Requirements

into sound technical architecture. Represent the data engineering practice in client conversations and new business contexts, communicating technical approaches clearly to non-technical stakeholders and contributing to proposals and SOW scoping. Drive adoption of engineering best practices across the team, including CI/CD, version control, infrastructure-as-code, data governance, and security on GCP.

Evaluate and introduce new tooling and approaches, including orchestration platforms, streaming architectures, and GCP's AI/ML capabilities, where they materially improve what the team can deliver.

Who You Are

What We Really Want: A technically deep data engineering leader who has grown past needing to prove themselves through individual output and is ready to be judged by what their team produces. You've made architectural decisions that mattered, you've managed engineers and made them better, and you know how to hold a technical conversation with a client without making it feel like a lecture. What Particular Set of Skills Would Suit This Role: 8+ years in data engineering, with at least 3 years in a leadership or senior technical lead role.