Senior Director, Head of Data

The Director, Head of Data provides the vision and leadership for how AAA Life manages and uses data across the company. This role is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a modern data environment that delivers accurate, reliable, and accessible information to support decision making, operational performance, and long-term growth throughout the enterprise.  The Director oversees data architecture, engineering, governance, and analytics enablement and ensures that data is organized, safeguarded, and used responsibly across all business units. This includes establishing clear ownership, strong quality standards, and consistent practices that continually build trust in the company’s data.  The role works closely with technology, actuarial, finance, distribution, product, and member experience teams to understand needs, set priorities, and ensure data consumers have the right information at the right time. This includes providing the insights and data foundations that help agents succeed in the field and serve members with clarity and confidence.  The Director builds and runs a high-performing team and creates the structure needed to scale data capabilities as the company modernizes. This technically-adept leader sets direction, drives alignment, and ensures that data becomes a managed asset that supports member value, operational efficiency, agent success, and future business opportunities. 

• Define and maintain the enterprise data strategy aligned to the company’s North Star architecture 

• Design and evolve the data platform including semantic layer, operational data layer, and integration patterns. 

• Establish domain-aligned data products with clear ownership, quality expectations, and SLAs. 

• Partner with enterprise architecture to ensure data decisions align with platform, cloud, and integration strategies. 

• Oversee delivery of data pipelines, ingestion patterns, event streaming, and operational data flows. 

• Lead teams in building Member 360, Actuarial Valuation data, financial reporting data, policy and claims domains, and other priority data products. 

• Ensure timely delivery of strategic data initiatives including CDC enablement, event modeling, and read models. 

• Implement reliable processes for deployment, monitoring, observability, and data quality measurement. 

• Stand up and chair the Data Council with business and technology leaders. 

• Define data policies, lineage, cataloging, access controls, retention, and metadata standards. 

• Develop a clear data ownership model across domains with accountability for quality and adoption. 

• Establish a data quality framework with automated checks, issue management, and scorecards. 

• Build and lead multi-disciplinary data squads including engineering, modeling, analytics enablement, and governance. 

• Develop a high-performance, product-oriented team structure aligned with domains such as Policy, Claims, Finance, Member Experience, and Agent Experience. 

• Partner with AAAL Academy on talent development, training paths, and skill assessments. 

• Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, curiosity, collaboration, and continuous improvement. 

• Work closely with Finance, Actuarial, Product, Member Services, Distribution, and Digital Experience to deliver data that drives business outcomes. 

• Translate business needs into data priorities with clear value, sequencing, and measurable impact. 

• Communicate data insights, progress, risks, and decisions to senior leadership. 

• Support modernization efforts including Life+ decommission, platform migrations, experience rebuilds, and operational optimization. 

• 10 years in data engineering, data architecture, or data analytics leadership roles. 

• Experience leading data programs in a regulated industry such as life insurance, financial services, or healthcare. 

• Demonstrated success building modern data platforms in cloud environments. 

• Strong understanding and demonstrated experience building trusted data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality principles. 

• Experience leading technology teams through transformation and modernization. 

• Ability to communicate clearly with, drive alignment with, and influence senior leaders. 

• Strong communication skills with the ability to present complex concepts concisely. 

• Experience with Snowflake, DBT, event streaming architectures, API integration patterns, and semantic modeling. 

• Experience building domain-based and business-empowered data products. 

• Familiarity with all tiers of medallion data architectures, data lake, data warehouse, and data lakehouse concepts.  

• Familiarity with Member 360 concepts, actuarial data needs, and operational analytics. 

• Work Solution: Hybrid (Tuesday- Thursday) or Remote (USA)

• Environment that promotes work-life balance
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage starting from your first day
• Employer 401k match and employer contribution to a pension plan
• Generous PTO and paid parental leave to support your family needs
• Various associate resource groups and community involvement initiatives

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to stand, walk, sit, use hands to finger, handle, or feel and talk or hear.  Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus. 

This job requires the ability to perform duties contained in the job description for this position, including, but not limited to, the above requirements.  Reasonable accommodations will be made for otherwise qualified applicants as needed to enable them to fulfill these requirements. 

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