• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 8 data engineers, fostering a culture of accountability, technical excellence, continuous learning, and collaboration. • Establish and model agile delivery practices, including sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives, and iterative delivery. • Build career development paths for team members and proactively recruit to scale the team as the platform evolves. • Serve as the primary IT interface for business stakeholders seeking data engineering capabilities, acting as both a trusted advisor and an accountable delivery partner. • Own the intake, prioritization, and roadmap planning process for data engineering work requests, balancing business urgency with technical capacity. • Partner with business leaders to identify and develop new data capabilities that drive competitive advantage — including reporting, analytics, and data product development. • Oversee day-to-day delivery and operational support of the current SQL Server-based data platform, ensuring high availability, performance, and data integrity. • Establish and enforce engineering standards for data quality, testing, CI/CD, documentation, and code review. • Define and monitor SLAs/SLOs for data platform services and hold the team accountable to operational excellence. • Embed data security and governance principles into all aspects of platform design and delivery. • Partner with Information Security, Compliance, and Architecture teams to ensure data assets are properly protected, cataloged, and governed. • Champion data stewardship practices across both engineering and business teams. • Collaborate closely with infrastructure and cloud engineering teams to ensure underlying compute, storage, and networking resources are performant, well-maintained, and cost-optimized. • Serve as a key stakeholder in infrastructure capacity planning and cloud cost management conversations. • Define and own the enterprise vision and multi-year roadmap for migrating from SQL Server to Azure Databricks, including the Lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake design, and data pipeline modernization strategy. • Develop a compelling, business-aligned business case — quantifying value, risk, and ROI — and present it to IT and company leadership to secure executive sponsorship and funding. • Build and maintain alignment across business, IT, Finance, and Infrastructure stakeholders throughout the migration lifecycle. • Lead phased execution of the migration, ensuring continuity of existing operations while progressively transitioning workloads to the new platform.