Head of Data

Responsibilities

• A key challenge of this role is balancing reactive work (data quality, stakeholder requests, system syncs) against executing the longer-term data strategy. You will own:
• Data Strategy & Infrastructure
• Own the full data infrastructure and architecture: pipelines, data models, gold/silver/bronze layer design, and real-time vs. batch tradeoffs.
• Develop a clear, actionable data strategy and own the process of getting buy-in across leadership, engineering, and product to execute it.
• Bridge the gap between technical data engineering and business context, translating leadership's strategic questions into queryable, actionable data products.
• Establish data governance, quality standards, and observability practices; ensure data lineage, security, and quality control are baked into the architecture, not added as an afterthought.
• Lead complex data projects requiring entity resolution and enrichment at scale, using deterministic rules, fuzzy matching, and ML-based approaches to unify multi-source data
• Prepare datasets and feature pipelines for machine learning workflows; prototype and implement predictive models that leverage unified datasets.
• Analytics & Self-Serve Insights
• Move the organization beyond dashboards toward self-serve analytics, insight generation, and data-driven recommendations that are accessible to humans, agents, and partners.
• Own data across both product data (what users do in the platform) and operational data (Salesforce, Zendesk, internal tooling), ensuring both feed into a coherent intelligence layer.
• Own the data product roadmap for external-facing analytics from scoping and architecture through to delivery, coordinating across data engineering and product to ship partner-facing features that surface clean, structured, and actionable insights.
• This includes leading complex, cross-functional data projects end-to-end: defining requirements, driving alignment, and ensuring the underlying data layer is accurate, performant, and built for non-technical consumption at scale.
• AI Collaboration
• Ensure the right data is available, clean, and structured so the AI engineering function can build and ship AI features confidently.
• Build toward a data layer that is AI-queryable: structure data so it can be consumed by agents, embedding models, and LLM-powered retrieval systems and find the right balance between unstructured and structured data.
• Collaborate closely with the engineering and ops teams to ensure data architecture decisions are upstream-compatible with the company's AI product roadmap.
• Stay close to the evolving AI landscape so you can be a credible thought partner to the teams building on top of your data platform.

Requirements

• We're seeking a Head of Data to join our Operations team and own the intelligence layer that sits across everything we build. Alternative Payments sits on a substantial and strategically valuable data asset, accounting data, payment data, and rich operational data from across the business.
• This is a player-coach role. You will set the architecture vision and own the data roadmap , but you will also roll up your sleeves by reviewing and contributing to code, solving data quality issues, and working directly with the data engineering team.
• This role is available to candidates eligible to work in the US, hybrid in New York.
• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, analytics, or a closely related field, with at least 2 years in a senior leadership role.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and SQL. You can review and contribute to code, not just manage engineers who write it.
• Deep technical fluency with data infrastructure end-to-end: from ingestion and pipeline design to serving layer and data model optimization.
• Proven experience with ML-based data enrichment and large data sets, and entity resolution at a meaningful scale, you have real opinions about where deterministic approaches break down and where ML is required.
• Fluency with AI data patterns: you understand what it means to structure data for retrieval-augmented generation, embedding search, and agent-based consumption.

Benefits

Additional Information

Job description Alternative Payments is building the financial operating system for SMBs, consolidating the disconnected tech stack that holds service-based businesses back. Starting with MSPs, we've spent five years perfecting accounts receivable, and we're now expanding into accounts payable, AI-powered analytics, and beyond. We're at an inflection point: closing the loop on money movement and laying the foundation for a platform that will reshape how service businesses operate financially. We're growing fast, thinking big, and building a global team that wants to be part of something that lasts. We believe the best solutions come from diverse perspectives, deep collaboration, and a shared obsession with customer impact. If you're energized by real problems, real customers, and real impact, we want to hear from you!

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