Data Strategist

What you'll do • Discovery & vision: Partner with client stakeholders to elicit goals, map pain points, and convert them into technical and analytical requirements with clear success criteria. • Roadmap & scope: Build delivery plans, define milestones, and manage scope, budget, and time lines across parallel projects. • Cross-team leadership: Coordinate data engineers, analytics engineers, BI developers, and SMEs; remove blockers; ensure capacity and velocity are healthy. • Agile execution: Lead or coach sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives; maintain sprint boards; blend Agile with pragmatic PM best practices. • Status & comms: Produce crisp updates for executives and teams; surface risks early; run RAID logs and drive mitigation plans. • Architecture guidance: Recommend high-level data platform approaches (ingestion → warehouse/lakehouse → transform → BI), weighing trade-offs with cost, security, and time-to-value. • Growth & retention: Identify extension/expansion opportunities and contribute to proposals and solution positioning. Tech landscape (you won't code daily, but you speak it) • Ingestion: Fivetran, Stitch (or similar) • Compute/warehouse/lakehouse: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift • Transformation & orchestration: dbt, Airflow, Matillion, SQLMesh (nice: Dagster) • BI/semantic: Tableau, Looker, Sigma • Practices: CI/CD for data, data quality/observability, cost governance What you bring • Be able to lead complex, multi-team data programs (multi-geo a plus). • Strong Agile/PM toolkit; able to tailor process to context. • Prior hands-on background in analytics / analytics engineering / data engineering (enough to translate between execs and builders). • Excellent written/spoken communication; calm under pressure; executive-ready. • Matrix/team leadership experience (influence without direct authority). • U.S. citizenship (required due to one government-sector workstream) Engagement details • Term: ~3 months to start; three active projects (one public-sector). • Cadence: Weeks 1-2 ~8-18 hrs/wk; Weeks 3-4 ~26 hrs/wk; gov't workstream adds ad-hoc hours. • Schedule: Monday-Friday only; no weekends or overtime. Work U.S. Eastern Time (candidates in other time zones adjust for early ET meetings). • Rate guidance: $90/hr - 120/hr • Reporting/administration: Approves time, partners with resource management on staffing.