Director, Data Platform & Analytics

Why You'll Love This Role:

As a strategic leader within the Technology team, you will define and drive the architecture of our data platform — encompassing data engineering, warehousing, analytics, and self-serve capabilities for internal and external stakeholders. You will be the connective tissue between technical complexity and meaningful decisions, setting the standards for data quality, governance, and access while empowering cross-functional partners across Product, Marketing, and Customer Success with the tools and insights to act decisively. By building the infrastructure and the culture that turns data into a genuine competitive advantage, you will directly shape how our educational platform evolves and how students and teachers engage with it.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Own and drive the data and analytics strategy, roadmap, and execution across the organization.
• Scale and mentor a high-performing team spanning data engineering, analytics, and platform.
• Partner with the executive team and cross-functional leaders to surface insights that inform business strategy and drive user growth and retention.
• Empower cross-functional partners across Product, Marketing, and Customer Success with the tools, frameworks, and self-serve access to make data-informed decisions confidently.
• Architect and evolve a scalable data platform — encompassing pipelines, warehouse infrastructure, and self-serve capabilities — for both internal and external users.
• Own the data catalog, ensuring data assets are well-documented, discoverable, and understood across the organization.
• Define and enforce data quality standards, monitoring, and remediation processes to ensure trustworthy data at every layer.
• Establish and maintain a data governance framework covering ownership, access controls, and data definitions across the organization.
• Own the BI environment in Tableau and self-serve analytics tool with Heap and Pendo, ensuring accurate reporting and broad data availability.

About You:

• Have 10+ years of data experience, including 2+ years leading teams spanning data engineering, analytics, warehousing, and business intelligence.
• Are hands-on as well as strategic — comfortable jumping into the details to unblock your team and drive projects forward.
• Are an exceptional mentor who thrives on developing talent and elevating the people around you.
• Have a strong ability to translate complex data into clear, actionable insights for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Are experienced working with diverse stakeholder groups and can facilitate productive conversations that drive alignment and shared goals.
• Have a proven track record of building and owning data governance frameworks, data quality standards, and data catalog practices from the ground up — and can drive adoption across an organization.
• Have direct experience with BigQuery and GCP as your core data warehouse and cloud platform.
• Are proficient in SQL and Python, and can write, review, and uplift others' code.
• Have hands-on experience with modern data stack tools including dbt for transformation and Dagster for orchestration.
• Are experienced with Tableau for enterprise BI and self-serve reporting.
• Have experience with product and web analytics platforms such as Heap and/or Pendo.
• Legally authorized to work in the US.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts. Additional benefits such as pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
• Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
• Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more!
• Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO plus 10 company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
• Professional Development:Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

About Newsela:

Newsela takes authentic, real world content from trusted sources and makes it instruction ready for K-12 classrooms. Each text is published at five reading levels, so content is accessible to every learner. Today, over 3.3 million teachers and 40 million students have registered with Newsela for content that's personalized to student interests, accessible to everyone, aligned to instructional standards, and attached to activities and reporting that hold teachers accountable for instruction and students accountable for their work. With over 15,000 texts on our platform and multiple new texts published every day across 20+ genres, Newsela enables educators to go deep on any subject they choose.