Head of Data Platform

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it. 

As the Head of Data Platform, you’ll be responsible for laying the foundation for a best-in-class analytics function. You’ll partner closely with our engineering team and business stakeholders to ensure that our analytics stack and processes meet the business needs today with an eye towards the future.

What you’ll do as the Head of Data Platform at Vanta:

• Roadmap and evolve the architecture of Vanta’s Snowflake‑based data warehouse, ensuring it scales to support real‑time analytics, zero‑trust principles, and FedRAMP‑capable compliance requirements

• Hire, train, and develop a world‑class team of data engineers and analytics engineers, providing hands-on mentorship and creating a culture of excellence and continuous learning. Establish the two respective functions as a collaborative set of teams

• Champion a security, compliance, and privacy‑first mindset across data ingestion, storage, transformation, access, and observability

• Deliver a “zero‑trust” data warehouse by implementing role‑based access controls, column‑level encryption, detailed audit logging, and automated policy enforcement

• Collaborate with AI, Strategic Finance, Revenue Operations, Data Science, Product Analytics, and Engineering to translate business objectives into a prioritized, measurable data platform roadmap

• Own buy‑versus‑build decisions for the data stack; evaluate vendors, negotiate contracts with procurement, and integrate best‑in‑class solutions where they accelerate our mission. Hold and measure your platform decisions to a high data platform ROI solution

• Be Vanta’s authoritative voice on dbt, change‑data‑capture (CDC), data orchestration patterns (Airflow/Dagster), and high‑performance database design

• Oversee the Architecture to Design and implement complex data models, metadata layers, reports, and dashboards that power internal decision‑making and customer‑facing analytics

• Develop front‑end applications and APIs that expose curated analytical data sets across the enterprise

• Develop Data Platform Application training, access patterns and enablement that internal customers consider “awesome”, and that you measure and hold your team to the highest standards delivering

• Contribute to data governance frameworks that guarantee data quality, availability, and discoverability

How to be successful in this role:

• 12+ years working with data, including 5+ years architecting and operating Snowflake at scale, plus 2+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience

• Demonstrated expertise in data storage strategies, CDC pipelines, database & BI architecture, and modern data orchestration patterns

• Proven success building secure, privacy‑aware, compliant data platforms (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001; FedRAMP experience a major plus)

• 4+ years Experience managing, mentoring and developing data engineers and analytics engineers; comfortable managing a 5-6 person team with multiple functions (ingestion / bi) with plans to scale

• System‑oriented mindset— you automate, abstract, and write maintainable, tested code.

• Hands‑on proficiency with the modern data stack: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow/Dagster, Fivetran/Stitch, Looker/Mode/Sigma

• Strong communication skills; able to translate deep technical detail into crisp narratives for executives and cross‑functional partners

• Adept at making pragmatic buy/build decisions and guiding organizations through platform migrations

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

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