This is a role for someone who thinks in outcomes, not dashboards. You'll lead the data platform and products function for one of New Zealand's most ambitious global companies — directly owning the infrastructure stack, driving a federated data model, and making sure the teams you lead are shipping measurable value every single week.

What you'll own
You'll directly lead the Platform team (Databricks lakehouse, AWS, Fivetran, orchestration) while driving the Data Products team to deliver weekly. The goal is a federated model where the platform provides the paved roads and business units own their own data — with 80%+ self-service across the organisation.

• Own the data platform end to end — architecture, code and design reviews, technical mentorship, and infrastructure decisions 
• Drive a federated ownership model — platform provides shared capabilities, BU teams own their data products and domain logic 
• Ship in 2–3 week cycles, validate with one BU before scaling, and actively retire initiatives that don't show measurable impact within 4–6 weeks 
• Measure what matters — time saved, decision quality, forecasting accuracy, adoption — not dashboards built or pipelines created 
• Build a composable, modular stack — no vendor lock-in, no unnecessary complexity, always simplifying 
• Develop and mentor a 10–20 person data team — building a high-density environment where strong people lead other strong people  

What we're looking for  

• 5–10 years leading data teams with a track record of connecting work to business outcomes — not just delivery volume
• Experience building federated or hub-and-spoke data models — you know when to centralise and when to hand ownership to the domain
• Hands-on technical grounding — SQL, Python, data modelling, pipelines, cloud. Not daily coding, but close enough to review, unblock, and raise the bar
• A bias toward speed — ships MVPs in 2–3 weeks, makes reversible decisions fast, and is comfortable killing things that aren't working
• Treats data as a product — starts from business problems, not tools, and is willing to stop work that doesn't demonstrate measurable impact

 
 
The stack
AWS (S3, IAM, MWAA Airflow, ECS) · Databricks · Delta Lake · Fivetran · dbt · Airflow · Power BI · Terraform · SQL

If you don't meet some of the technologies, it's okay! What we're looking for is a robust, well rounded platform experience - if you can suggest alternatives, the team's open to considering.

If you're interested in having a conversation about this role or other similar opportunities, please feel free to reach out to me: marian@rwa.co.nz
  
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