Director, Platform Design & Intelligence

We're looking for a hands-on technical leader who loves systems design and is deeply curious about our audience. You'll co-design and implement Complex's platform, AI, and agentic infrastructure with both leaders and technical colleagues, building secure systems, proprietary tools, and better audience experiences. You'll exercise architectural decision-making authority with both leaders' advice and consent, especially in continuous improvement, refinement, and optimization. We believe software is the new media: bring design thinking to our content and audience systems, building for durability and adaptability. This position will be on-site in our New York, NY or Los Angeles, CA office.

Responsibilities

Co-design the platform architecture and roadmap with leaders and drive implementation with the team; Deepen the structured data lake and build reliable pipelines, warehouse models, and reusable services with SQL, Python, Snowflake, and AWS; Recommend what to build, buy, integrate, or retire, and implement agreed changes that remove unnecessary middleware, redundant licenses, and single-purpose tools; Develop and implement standards with engineering colleagues for data quality, testing, lineage, observability, and deployment; Improve performance, cloud costs, resilience, and recovery; Work with data scientists and data engineers to understand the audience and help develop and implement segmentation across teams; Design signal capture that connects audience interactions to useful data, making it accessible and trustworthy for analytics, experimentation, content strategy, and product decisions; Partner with content, product, and engineering teams on proprietary tools and new audience interactions; Build data foundations for machine learning and generative AI, including training and inference pipelines, embeddings, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation where appropriate; Test new models and tools, evaluate results, and recommend priorities to leaders; Implement agreed AI and agentic applications with the team, including evaluation and monitoring; Work with development, security, and applied AI colleagues to protect personally identifiable information and implement appropriate access controls; Stay hands-on in implementation and architectural refinement while mentoring engineers; Support hiring and development, and help establish practices for code quality, version control, CI/CD, and operational reliability; Help teams adopt the tools built, explain technical choices, and connect their use to content strategy and everyday decisions; Translate business needs into implementation priorities with leaders and cross-functional partners, coordinate delivery, and measure results against agreed outcomes

Requirements

8+ years in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related discipline, including 3+ years leading teams, technical initiatives, or data platform architecture; 5+ years each with SQL and Python, including complex data exploration, optimization, warehouse modeling, and production data or automation workflows; 3+ years each with Snowflake; AWS services such as S3, EC2, and Lambda; and Apache Airflow or comparable orchestration tools such as Dagster or Prefect; Experience building scalable production data platforms and pipelines, with strong data quality, testing, observability, and operational practices; Experience supporting machine learning or AI through data engineering or infrastructure; an understanding of statistical analysis, experimentation, and data science workflows; and working knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, vector search, RAG, and AI application architecture; Strong systems design and problem-solving skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions to engineers and non-technical colleagues and work effectively with executives and cross-functional teams; Curiosity about the audience, sound judgment around security and data use, and a willingness to keep learning as models and tools change; Must be willing to work on-site in the New York or Los Angeles office; Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for visa sponsorship

Nice to have

Leading AI transformation or platform initiatives; building production LLM applications and AI-powered automation; evaluating models, retrieval systems, and AI performance; Infrastructure as code such as Terraform; CI/CD, Docker, or Kubernetes; distributed processing such as Spark; data governance, metadata, lineage, security, and privacy; Digital media, advertising, publishing, entertainment, or consumer technology; high-growth or resource-constrained teams; evaluating third-party platforms and build-versus-buy decisions

Benefits

Best in class health, dental, and vision insurance; Healthcare FSA; Dependent Care FSA; Commuter Benefits FSA; Short-term/long-term disability and life insurance; Paid Parental leave; 401k with 4% match; Pet Insurance; Legal and Identity Theft Plans; Flexible PTO