Sr. Director Data Platform Engineering & Operations

San Diego, CA

The Sr. Director Data Platform Engineering & Operations is a critical leadership role at SIE, responsible for driving innovation and scalability across the company’s data and AI platform ecosystem. This role oversees platforms including Data Infrastructure (Streaming, Ingestion, Warehouse, and Data Ocean), Experimentation and Audience Platforms, and Governance & Data Observability tools.

In this role, you will ensure SIE’s platforms process massive volumes of data, delivering insights that enhance Player, Creator, Publisher, and Enterprise experiences. By enabling data-driven decisions at scale, you will drive the future of personalized gaming, efficient operations, and enterprise productivity through advanced AI and machine learning technologies.

As a strategic leader, you will define and execute the vision for SIE’s data and AI platform ecosystem, ensuring scalable solutions that support key business objectives across gaming, content creation, and enterprise operations. Reporting to the VP of Data & AI, you will lead global teams of engineers and experts to build platforms that democratize data and transform decision-making across the company.  Priority consideration will be given to candidates with proven experience in a previous or current Sr. Director level role. 

This highly cross-functional role works closely with senior leadership in engineering, product, and business to align the platform ecosystem with the organization’s strategic goals.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership:

• Define the long-term vision for SIE’s Data and AI Platform ecosystem, aligning with business goals and driving value across Player, Creator, Publisher, and Enterprise touchpoints.
• Lead the development of platforms that process large-scale, real-time data from millions of users, delivering insights to enhance gaming experiences, content creation, and enterprise productivity.
• Build scalable platforms for personalized player experiences, content creation tools, and enterprise efficiency, optimizing performance and cost-effectiveness.

Platform Development & Operations:

• Provide thought leadership in the design, architecture, and execution of the platform ecosystem, ensuring innovation and seamless integration with SIE’s global gaming services and enterprise operations.
• Ensure platforms are optimized for performance, scalability, and reliability, processing billions of data points daily across Player, Creator, Publisher, and Enterprise activities.
• Champion operational excellence by driving continuous improvements in platform cost efficiency, performance, and security to support SIE’s global user base.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Collaborate with senior leaders to deliver data and AI solutions that drive value across gaming, content creation, and enterprise operations.
• Work with teams to ensure data platforms improve engagement, content creation, monetization, and efficiency.
• Ensure compliance with privacy, security, and regulatory requirements while supporting scalable data operations.

Innovation & Efficiency:

• Lead efforts to optimize platform performance, reduce costs, and improve data accessibility across gaming and enterprise operations.
• Implement innovative solutions to scale data operations and maximize value from Player, Creator, Publisher, and Enterprise data.
• Drive AI/ML adoption to enhance gaming experiences, content discovery, operational efficiency, and enterprise workflows.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field.

Experience:

Technical Expertise:

• 15+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or related fields, with deep expertise in designing and building distributed data systems and large-scale data warehouses.
• Proven track record of architecting platforms capable of processing petabytes of data and supporting the real-time ingestion and processing of billions of data points daily across gaming and enterprise domains.
• Extensive experience in building and scaling cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP) for data platforms, with a strong focus on high availability, fault tolerance, and cost-efficiency.
• Demonstrated success in growing and evolving data platforms to meet the needs of a rapidly scaling business, ensuring data-driven decisions are made at all levels of the organization.
• Extensive experience with Kafka for data streaming and real-time data ingestion.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of Databricks and Snowflake for scalable data engineering, analytics, and cloud data warehousing.
• Proven experience making buy vs. build decisions, assessing in-house development versus integrating third-party platforms based on cost, scalability, and business needs.
• Expertise with Data Governance tools such as Alation and Collibra for managing data catalogs, compliance, and data quality.
• Knowledge and experience with Data Observability tools to monitor data pipelines and ensure data accuracy, reliability, and transparency.
• Experience with experimentation platforms such as Optimizely, Statsig, and LaunchDarkly, with a focus on A/B testing and feature management.
• Expertise in AI/ML platforms like AWS SageMaker and Databricks MLflow for machine learning model development, deployment, and MLOps practices.

Leadership & Strategic Skills:

• Proven leadership (in a prior Sr. Director level role strongly preferred) building and leading high-performing global engineering teams, balancing short-term execution with long-term strategic growth.
• Strong strategic mindset, translating business objectives into scalable technical solutions that deliver value across the organization.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, driving impactful solutions across engineering, product, and business teams.

#LI-GD1

POSITION OVERVIEW:

As the Sr. Director/Vice President, Artificial Intelligence, you will lead the strategic development and enterprise-wide adoption of AI capabilities that support organizational transformation. Your role involves defining the AI vision, building a scalable roadmap, and driving execution across multiple business units. You will partner with Technology, Operations, Product, and executive leadership to identify high-value use cases, develop AI solutions, and integrate them into core business processes to deliver measurable results. This position requires a high level of autonomy, technical expertise, and strategic leadership, including assessing business needs, ensuring data readiness, designing and deploying models, overseeing MLOps practices, and implementing responsible AI principles. Your experience in AI, machine learning, data strategy, communication, stakeholder alignment, and solution delivery will be essential in enabling the organization’s transformation goals.

JOB FUNCTIONS:

(This list is not exhaustive and may be supplemented or changed as necessary.)

• Lead the strategic planning, development, and execution of the company’s AI roadmap and long-term innovation strategy.
• Identify, evaluate, and prioritize AI and machine learning opportunities that improve operations, automation, and business value.
• Apply structured methodologies to assess use case feasibility, technical readiness, adoption requirements, and expected ROI.
• Partner with Data Engineering and Technology teams to build and deploy scalable AI models, generative AI capabilities, and decision intelligence tools.
• Oversee all stages of the AI development lifecycle, including model design, testing, deployment, monitoring, retraining, and performance optimization.
• Develop and manage responsible AI frameworks that address transparency, risk, ethics, compliance, and governance.
• Conduct impact analyses and assess organizational readiness to adopt AI-driven processes and technologies.
• Create and deliver communication strategies to support AI adoption for leaders, teams, and stakeholders.
• Collaborate with business units to map workflows, redesign processes, and integrate AI-driven solutions into operations.
• Lead the design and implementation of training programs that support end-user adoption of AI tools.
• Build, develop, and mentor a high-performing AI organization across data science, machine learning, and applied AI disciplines.
• Partner with external technology providers, vendors, academic institutions, and research organizations to evaluate emerging AI technologies.
• Create metrics and dashboards to measure activation, performance, and business impact of AI solutions.
• Lead continuous improvement efforts through data analysis, root cause assessment, and iterative solution updates.
• Communicate complex technical concepts and model insights to executive leadership in clear, accessible language.
• Manage AI program budgets, resources, vendor contracts, and reporting requirements.

QUALIFICATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS:

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field required.
  Advanced degree preferred.

Technical Experience:

• 12 to 15 or more years of experience in AI, machine learning, data science, or advanced analytics.
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying machine learning models and generative AI systems in production environments.
• Deep understanding of modern AI techniques including large language models, natural language processing, deep learning, predictive modeling, and reinforcement learning.
• Experience implementing MLOps pipelines, model governance, and scalable AI systems in cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Experience leading organization-wide AI or data transformation initiatives.
• Experience managing cross-functional teams and external partners or vendors.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Ability to define AI strategy, scope work, estimate effort, and drive execution.
• Ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences and communicate with executives.
• Strong knowledge of AI ethics, responsible AI practices, and regulatory considerations.
• Ability to lead teams, influence stakeholders, and guide cross-functional efforts toward a shared vision.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to interpret complex data and model results.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in dynamic and fast-paced environments.
• Forward-thinking mindset with a focus on innovation and continuous learning.
• Strong presentation skills and experience delivering training or communication materials.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without employer sponsorship now or in the future.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of the requirements that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to use a computer keyboard and mouse; reach with hands and arms; talk and listen. The employee is frequently required to walk and sit, as well as to lift and carry objects such as books and files weighing up to 25 pounds. The employee is occasionally required to stand, stoop, or kneel. Specific vision abilities required by this position include close vision and the ability to adjust focus.

Work Environment:

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job, including moderate noise level, an indoor temperate environment, and light levels that are bright and conducive to minimal eye strain, typical for an office environment.

TOTAL REWARDS PROGRAM:

We define total rewards as compensation, benefits, remote work/flexibility, development, recognition and our culture with programs that support each of our reward pillars. This includes a market competitive base salary and annual incentive plan, robust benefit offerings, and ongoing recognition and career development opportunities. Employees also enjoy our generous flexible paid time off program, company paid holidays, flexible working hours, and fully remote work options for most positions and the ability to work “almost anywhere”. However, if a physical work location is more for you, we have office locations in Greater Boston; San Diego, CA; Boulder, CO; and India.

LEGAL STATEMENT:
 
Syner-G is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employers. All employment decisions, including the recruiting, hiring, placement, training availability, promotion, compensation, evaluation, disciplinary actions, and termination of employment (if necessary) are made without regard to the employee’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, pregnancy or childbirth, personal appearance, family responsibilities, sexual orientation or preference, gender identity, political affiliation, source of income, place of residence, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military veteran status, unfavorable discharge from military service, physical or mental disability, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law. Syner-G is an E-Verify employer. 

What You Will Contribute To Altos

Altos Labs is building a world-class AI ecosystem to solve the most complex problems in human biology. You will directly design and build high-performance, scalable solutions that unify high-dimensional biomedical imaging with molecular and language data.

By implementing large-scale multimodal data fusion, you will move beyond simple image analysis to create predictive models that map across biological domains. You will be hands-on with the data and the code, collaborating with our engineering team to ensure these models are scalable, efficiently trainable on distributed cloud infrastructure, and accessible to our global research community.

Responsibilities

• Model Development: Design, code, and train large-scale foundation models (e.g., Vision Transformers, Multimodal LLMs) that can embed spatial data and integrate multiple modalities.
• Hands-on Data Fusion: Implement innovative cross-domain mapping and fusion strategies to synchronize heterogeneous biological datasets.
• Scaling & Training: Build and manage high-performance ML pipelines capable of processing petabyte-scale image repositories and multi-omics streams in a cloud environment.
• Technical Collaboration: Work directly in the trenches with experimental scientists and software engineers to translate biological complexity into performant code and reliable distributed systems.

Who You Are

We are looking for a technical specialist who thrives on solving "unsolvable" problems through code and rigorous experimentation. We are open to candidates at the Scientist I, Scientist II, or Senior Scientist level based on technical expertise.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, Biomedical Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• Hands-on CV Expertise: Deep experience building and deploying modern Computer Vision architectures (Vision Transformers, U-Nets, Self-Supervised Learning).
• Distributed Training: Proven experience training and fine-tuning large models at scale using frameworks like PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, or Jax.
• Programming Mastery: Expert-level Python skills, with a focus on building production-ready machine learning code and large-scale data management systems.
• Scientific Contributions: A track record of technical contributions via high-impact publications (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, etc.) or significant contributions to open-source ML frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with Multimodal Fusion (e.g., aligning image embeddings with transcriptomic or proteomic data).
• Proficiency with cloud-native AI tools (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Docker) and building automated MLOps workflows.
• Experience handling the unique noise and sparsity of biological data.

The salary range for Redwood City, CA:

• Scientist I, Machine Learning: $200,900 - $257,500
• Scientist II, Machine Learning: $226,200 - $290,000
• Senior Scientist I, Machine Learning: $257,400 - $330,000

The salary range for San Diego, CA:

• Scientist I, Machine Learning: $179,400 - $230,000
• Scientist II, Machine Learning: $212,900 - $273,000
• Senior Scientist I, Machine Learning: $239,500 - $307,000

#LI-NN1

Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

For UK applicants, before submitting your application:

- Please click here to read the Altos Labs EU and UK Applicant Privacy Notice (bit.ly/eu_uk_privacy_notice)
- This Privacy Notice is not a contract, express or implied and it does not set terms or conditions of employment.