Head of Global Data Engineering and BI
Job Description Summary
Maybe you’ve stopped by for a coffee, fueled up your car or grabbed something to eat on the go. Then you know Circle K is all about making everyday life easier for people all over the world. We are a Global Fortune 200 company and have grown into a successful global business with over 15,000 stores in twenty-four countries, serving more than six million customers each day. In all, we have more than 120,000 people working at our stores and support offices.
To support our journey to become a data driven organization, we are transforming our data platform and processes to enable an agile delivery model, maximize reusability, and leverage automation to improve our delivery quality and speed to market. We are looking for a dynamic leader to lead our Global Data Engineering and BI team and to lead the data platform transformation. For the right candidate, Circle K can offer a challenging and rewarding role working with a talented, global team. In this role you will own the delivery of data products and solutions for various strategic initiatives, including Global Merchandising Excellence (pricing, assortments, promotions), Global Fuels (pricing), Global Loyalty, Supply Chain (merch COGS), Finance, Real Estate (analog & whitespace), B2C / B2B (payment transactions analytics), Operations (shrink and sales analytics), etc.
The Head of Global Data Engineering and BI will report to the VP of Global Tech Enterprise, Data and Retail Technologies within Circle K and lead a global team of approximately fifty employees (including open positions) and seventy-five contractors. This role will be a key contributor to driving company performance through achieving Circle K’s data analytics strategy and fostering a data driven culture across the organization. This position will be based out of Tempe, Arizona or Charlotte, North Carolina and covers all business units and countries where Circle K operates.
The role will require a high degree of collaboration across all business functions including the Global Technology and Global Data & Analytics teams. It will involve evangelizing effective data management practices, determining how to best leverage relevant existing and emerging technologies, and promoting better understanding and utilization of data and analytics at Circle K. Working with key functional partners and stakeholders, internal technical subject-matter experts, suppliers, and industry experts having the right data, avoiding data bias by including data from varied sources, ensuring the fitness for use and quality of the data and providing the mechanisms to share/leverage common data solutions across Circle K.
In this role, the Head of Global Data Engineering and BI manages and controls:
- Logical and physical corporate data warehouse and data marts for specific business areas to minimize data redundancy.
- Specific analytics and business intelligence (BI) platforms and tools to share and leverage analytic insights across the company.
- The investigation and application of relevant emerging technology in the Data and Analytics domain, including GenAI.
A large focus of this role is to lead the team responsible for building, managing and optimizing the enterprise data supply chain for key data and analytics consumers (e.g., business & data analysts, data scientists, etc.) to drive business value. The team will ensure data pipelines, models and algorithms are optimized for data integrity, performance, security, and governance.
Responsibilities:
- Building and maintaining the data supply chain: Lead a team that architects, builds and manages the Company’s data supply chain. This will entail ingestion of both existing and future-state data sources to be determined based on business needs.
- Being a data and analytics evangelist: Promote the available data and analytics capabilities and expertise to functional heads and business unit leaders and educate them in how to best leverage these capabilities in achieving their business goals. In addition, this role will bring relevant leading-edge technology into the solution set for driving business value more quickly.
- Collaborate across functions: Require strong collaboration skills to work with varied stakeholders within the organization. Work in close relationship with cross-functional leaders to scope and prioritize initiatives.
- Manage the technology for the data ecosystem: Build, integrate, and maintain enterprise data & analytics technologies for data ingestion; brokering and integration; data warehouse/lake; data marts; and reporting, visualization, and other business intelligence tools.
- Review and enhance development standards and best practices: Ensure repeatable and scalable solutions to deliver high quality data products and solutions to the enterprise (e.g., Dev Ops, CI/CD, data quality automations, peer code reviews, knowledge sharing, support model, etc.).
Qualifications:
The Head of Global Data Engineering and BI must have considerable experience with data management and analytics processes and technology. In addition, we expect:
- A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, data science, business analytics, statistics, applied mathematics, information systems, information science or a related quantitative field (or equivalent work experience) required.
- Strong experience and knowledge in retail industry preferred.
- At least ten years of experience in data analytics leadership roles, managing data engineering and BI teams to deliver global enterprise data solutions using Data Lake, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence capabilities.
- Experience in managing large, globally distributed teams.
- At least 5 years of experience hiring and mentoring high caliber, data focused engineers with diverse technical strengths and background.
- Deep experience with data engineering, big data and analytical technologies using cloud-based data platforms.
- Expert in guiding the organization to make data-driven decisions by providing clear, concise, and accurate data insights.
- A track record of identifying relevant leading-edge technology and achieving benefits of early adoption.
- Strong supplier management, negotiation, and commercial skills.
- Strong financial skills to effectively manage the operational and project budgets (including forecasts and to provide resourcing cost estimates to support new demands).
- Experience in integrating complex, cross-functional processes, and data models.
- Broad experience in multiple domain areas including data warehousing; business intelligence (BI); data architecture; data integration; data engineering, data classification; data strategy; data quality management; and enterprise architecture framework.
- Required technical skills and experience:
- Advanced Data Engineering: expert in data mesh reference architecture, data modeling, developing, and optimizing ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) processes and data pipeline development. Experience with Azure Data Factory, Apache Airflow, and various data ingestion methods (batch, streaming, API, enterprise hub) required.
- Data Warehousing: strong understanding of data warehousing concepts, practices, and tools such as SnowFlake.
- Consumption Tools: good understanding of BI tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, Qualtrics, etc.
- Cloud Platforms: strong experience with Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud and their data services (Azure Synapse, Redshift, BigQuery).
- Data Governance and Security: Familiarity with data privacy laws, regulatory compliance, ethics of data use, and data security best practices.
- AI/ML Platforms: strong experience with DataBricks.
- Advanced Analytics Tools: Experience with R, Python, Java, C++, Scala, etc.
- Common Database Programming Languages: Experience with SQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra.
- Experience in working with large, heterogeneous datasets.
- Experience with Data science and machine learning models and algorithms.
- Experience with Automation tools such as Trifacta, Paxata, etc.
- Experience with Agile and Scrum development, preferably with SaFe Agile.
- Knowledge/Skills:
- Strong, results-driven personality with a high level of enthusiasm, energy and confidence.
- Demonstrated leadership; proven track record of leading complex, new endeavors and delivering solutions.
- A sense of urgency with a demonstrated commitment to high ethical standards, comfort with regulatory compliance, customer service and business integrity.
- Ability to work with ambiguity as the organization continues to evolve.
- Strong leadership skills to move the team through a major change, initiative to drive change forward and identify solutions to potential obstacles.
- Effective communication and relationship-building skills to work collaboratively with Operational Business Units, Global Functions and Global Tech stakeholders.
- Ability to share information across business functions and disciplines; manage stakeholders with diverse interests; make actionable recommendations.
- Excellent communication, organizational and presentation skills.
- Excellent interpersonal skills: able to work across business lines at senior levels to influence and effect change to achieve common goals.
- Ability to effectively drive people, process, and technology change in a dynamic and complex operating environment.
- Demonstrated ability to work as part of a global team, including understanding how to navigate cultural differences in workstyles and communications.
- Strong people management skills to help develop team members in the competency-based org structure.
- Strong analytical skills to derive actionable insights from complex datasets.
- Ability to diagnose data-related issues and implement effective solutions.
- Develop solutions which focus on how to successfully extract insight from big data.
- Keen understanding of business objectives and ability to apply this understanding to recommend practical solutions.
- Strategic technology planning and execution experience, policy development and maintenance.
- Effectively communicate in English, in both written and oral forms.