Head of Data, Platform and Intelligence

ROLE SUMMARY

AsHead ofDatayouwill define and lead Babel Street's North Star DataStrategy andArchitecture, building a cohesive, scalable, and AI-native data platform that transforms fragmented systems into a unified foundation for intelligence, analytics, and product innovation.

You will own the full lifecycle of data across the organization, from ingestion and storage to semantics, retrieval, and productization. Your mandate is to unify fragmented systems into a cohesive, scalable, and AI-ready data platform that directly enables investigative, analytical, and operational workflows across Babel Street's product suite.

You will work closely with Product and Engineering leadership, to ensure that data is not just infrastructure, but a core competitive advantage. This includes powering Babel Street's Knowledge Graph, enabling agentic and generative AI systems, and delivering data capabilities that are reliable, performant, and economically efficient at scale.

This role requires deep technicalexpertise, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to translate complex data challenges into customer-impacting intelligence capabilities.

This hybrid role will be based in our Reston, VA or Somerville, MA office.

ROLE SPAN

This role spansfourintegrated domains:

1. Data Platform & Storage Architecture

You will help define andevolveBabel Street's unified data platform,consolidatingwarehouse,searchand object storage systems into a cohesive scalable foundation. This includesestablishingclearpatterns for when and how to use analytical warehouses,search/index systems, and object storage to support diverse workloads across the business.

You will architect systems thatoperateat petabyte scale, ensuring high performance, reliability, and flexibility across batch and real-time data. A key focus will be driving platform rationalization whilemaintainingcontinuity of operations and minimizing risk.

You will alsoestablishstandards for data ingestion, transformation, and lifecycle management, ensuring consistency and efficiency across the platform.

2. Data Semantics, Knowledge Graph & Identity

You will own the semantic foundation of Babel Street's data ecosystem, defining how data is modeled, connected, and understood across products and systems.

This includes building and evolving thecompany'sknowledge graph, including entity resolution, identitymodeling,and relationship mapping across disparatedata sources. You willestablishontology and schema strategies that ensure consistent interpretation of data across teams, products, and AI systems.

Your work will enable graph-integrated reasoning and provide the structures contextrequiredfor intelligence workflows and AI-driven applications.

3. Data Access, Retrieval & AI-Enablement

You will design andoperatedata access patterns that power both human and machine consumption of data, including API's, querylayersand retrieval systems.

This includes enabling hybrid retrieval approaches across structured,unstructuredand vector-based data to support LLMs, RAGpipelines, andagentic systems. You willensure that data isaccessiblein a way that isperformant,scalable,and optimized for AIworkloads.

You will partnercloselywith AI and Applied ML teams to ensure seamless integration between data systems and model-driven capabilities,enablingreliable, explainable, and efficient intelligence generation.

4. Data Productization, Governance & Economics

You willestablisha data-as-a-productoperatingmodel, ensuring that dataassetsare discoverable,reusable,and governed with clear ownership and accountability.

This includes defining contracts, enforcingqualitystandards, and implementing metadata and governance frameworks that scale across the organization.

You will also own the economics of the data platform,ensureefficient use of storage and compute, andoptimizecost per query, cost per workload, and overall systemefficiency. A key focus will be enabling scalable AI usage through efficient data retrieval and storage strategies.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Define the North Star Data Architecture

• Establish and evolve the target-state data architecture, aligning storage, compute, search, and access patterns into a unified platform
• Drive architectural clarity across warehouse, search, object storage, and real-time systems
• Ensure consistency in schemas, metadata, and governance frameworks across all data domains

Build an AI-Native Data Foundation

• Design a data platformoptimizedfor AI and agentic workloads, including:
  API-first, agent-callable data services
• Hybrid retrieval patterns (search + analytical + vector)
• Real-time and batch data unification
• Enable scalable support for LLMs, RAG pipelines, and intelligence workflows

Own Data as a Product

• Establish a data-as-a-productoperatingmodel, enabling discoverable, reusable, and well-governed data assets
• Define and standardize data contracts, ownership models, and domain boundaries
• Translate platform capabilities into customer-facing data products and differentiators

Lead Platform Rationalization and Evolution

• Rationalize and evolve the current ecosystem (e.g.,BigQuery, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, S3) into a cohesive and cost-efficient architecture
• Lead phased, low-risk migrations and consolidations aligned to business priorities
• Balance short-term pragmatism with long-term architectural integrity

Own Performance, Reliability, and Cost Economics

• Accountable for performance, scalability, and reliability of all data systems
• Establish clear unit economics for data (e.g., cost per query, cost per workload, storage efficiency)
• Implement strong observability, SLOs, and incident management practices

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience indata platforms, dataengineering,or distributed systems
• Strong background working within multi-cloud or hybrid environments, including hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale data platforms through major architectural transitions (e.g., warehouse, search, Lakehouse, or multi-cloud transformations)
• Deep expertise across multiple data paradigms, including:
• Analytical warehouses
• Search/index systems
• Object storage and distributed data systems
• Experience building platforms that support AI, ML, or agent-driven systems
• Familiarity with vector search, retrieval architectures, and modern AI data patterns
• Experience with graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graphs
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience operating in regulated, high-stakes, or mission-critical environments is strongly preferred.

EDUCATION

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, ora relatedtechnical fieldrequired.
Master'sdegree or PhD preferred.

Benefits at Babel Street (just to name a few...)

• Health Benefits: Babel Street covers 85-100% monthly premium costs for Medical, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability insurances - for you and your family!
• Retirement Plans:Babel Street offers both a Traditional and Roth 401(K) with a very competitive match.
• Unlimited Flexible Leave: We trust our employees to manage their own time and balance their personal and work lives.
• Holidays: Babel Street provides employees with 12 paid Federal Holidays
• Tuition Reimbursement: We are committed to investing in our employees. One way we do that is with our Tuition Reimbursement Program for continuing education.

Babel Street is anequalopportunity/affirmative actionemployer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration foremploymentwithout regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. Further,Babel Street will not discriminate against applicants for inquiring about, discussing or disclosing their pay or, in certain circumstances, the pay of their co-worker,Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination.In addition, Babel Street's policy is to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works. Upon request, we will provide you with more information about such accommodations.