Director Data Engineering

Publicis Sapient (PS) is a leader in the digital transformation space helping the best brands in the world get to their future digitally enabled state both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. Fueled by a recognized heritage in large-scale IT and engineering we combine market-leading capabilities in strategy technology & engineering platforming experience design and more. We deliver ideas through execution across the ten business sectors in which we operate.

As digital pioneers with 20000 people and 53 offices around the globe our experience spanning technology data sciences consulting and customer obsession is amplified by our parent company Publicis Groupe the worlds largest multinational communications and marketing organization. Our culture is one of curiosity and relentlessness and we embrace diversity and reward imagination. We seek achievers leaders and visionaries and our team looks to each person to bring skills and passion to help our clients solve their biggest business challenges.

Role Overview

Publicis Sapient is looking for a Director DataEngineeringto lead top-notch technologists and enablereal businessoutcomes for enterprise clients. You will create impact for some of the worlds biggest brands by translating complex business needs into scalable AI-ready data solutions that deliver measurable value. Working with modern cloud data platforms distributed processing frameworks and AI/ML-enabled engineering patterns you will help clients evolve toward a more digital data-driven and AI-enabled future. Successful candidates will bring deep data engineeringexpertise hands-on technical credibility experience leading teams and a proventrack recordof creating steering and closing new business opportunities.

Your Daily Duties & Impact:

• Act as a trusted advisor to clients byleveragingdata analytics and AI-ready data foundations to drive customer engagement operational insight and large-scale digital transformation outcomes.

• Work closely with clients to evaluate and recommend design patterns and solutions for modern data platforms with a focus on ETL ELT ALT lambda kappa streaming event-drivenlakehouse and data mesh architectures.

• Define SLAs SLIs and SLOs with clients product owners and engineers to deliver reliable data-driven and AI-enabled experiences.

• Provideexpertise proof-of-concept prototype and reference implementations for cloud on-prem hybrid and edge-based data platforms.

• Lead the design and delivery of large-scale data systems data processing data transformation platform modernization and production-grade data services.

• Support AI-enabled engineering use cases by designing high-quality data foundations retrieval patterns context engineering approaches and scalable data services that power agentic machine learning and generative AI solutions.

• Guidethe data engineering responsibilities required for AI/ML deployment support validation monitoring rollback evaluation and operational reliability.

• Oversee telemetry and observability pipelines for AI-enabled services including capture of prompt response trace latency token cost quality and reliability data inqueryableforms.

• Partner with leadership to bring opportunities to closure and transition them into delivery. Represent the PS portfolio through early-stage selling proposal development client oral presentations and competitive win strategy.

• Provide technical inputs to agile processes including epic story and task definition and remove barriers throughout the lifecycle of client engagements.

• Create andmaintaininfrastructure-as-code for cloud on-prem and hybrid environments using tools such as Terraform CloudFormation Azure Resource Manager Helm and Google Cloud Deployment Manager.
• Mentor support and manage team members while continuing to model hands-on technical leadership and delivery excellence.

Your Skills & Experience:

• Exceptional data engineering skills with a distributed computing background and proven experience delivering large-scale production-grade data platforms.

• Ability to create new pursuits across target client accounts and bring forward clear compelling technically credible client propositions.

• Strong consulting business strategy technical andpeopleleadership skills with the ability to influence stakeholders gain consensus and build trusted client relationships.

• Hands-on experience with data processing and analytic engineering using SQL DBT Python SparkPySpark Java JavaScript Scala or similar tools.

• Strong Pythonproficiencyand practical experience using Python-based tooling for data engineering automation platform development and AI engineering workflows.

• Experience designing and implementing data ingestion validation enrichment batch streaming and event-driven pipelines.

• Cloud-native data platform design experience across leading public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform Snowflake and Databricks.

• Experience with Databricks or similarlakehouseplatforms including notebooks jobs Delta Lake orchestration optimization andlakehouseimplementation patterns.

• Data modeling querying and optimization experience across relational NoSQL timeseries graph databases data warehouses data lakes and modernlakehousepatterns.

• Hands-onexpertiseacross the big data ecosystem for data integration data storage compute frameworks analytics advanced visualization AI/ML platforms and production data services.

• Familiarity withMLOpsconcepts and the data engineering responsibilities required to support AI/ML deployment validation monitoring rollback evaluation and operational reliability.

• Experience building andmaintainingpipelines behind retrieval systems including document parsing chunking metadata extraction embedding generation incremental reindexing and the vector graph semantic search and knowledge retrieval structures they feed.

• Exposure to AI engineering patterns including context engineering retrieval-augmented generation support patterns agent architectures and production data services that support AI-enabled experiences.

• Experience modeling and persisting agent state including session context conversation history memory stores lineage provenance and data contracts for context and retrieval sources.

• Experience building evaluation data infrastructure for AI systems including ground-truth and golden datasets offline evaluation pipelines LLM-as-judge scaffolding regression testing and data quality measurement.

• Exposure to cloud AI services or agentic platforms such as Vertex AI Azure AI services AWS AI services Pi Hermes Agent or comparable platforms is helpful; specific platform experience is less important than understanding how AI engineering differs from traditional data engineering.

• Experience with automated testing frameworks data validation and quality frameworks release management production support and data lineage frameworks.

• Metadata definition and management experience through data catalogs service catalogs and stewardship tools such asOpenMetadataDataHub Alation AWS Glue Catalog Google Data Catalog or similar.

• Ability to lead teams that rapidlylearna clients current digital ecosystem and produce a future-state data landscape vision and strategy aligned to transformation agenda and business goals.

• Point of view on build vs. buy decisions performance considerations hosting options commercial models business intelligence reporting analytics and AI-enabled product and platform capabilities.

• Experience interacting with clients vendors and Publicis Groupe peers with a focus on strategic optimization quality control delivery excellence and adherence to the Digital Business Transformation vision.

• Experience interviewing and assessing prospective team members new hires vendors and other contributors across a project community.

• Proposal creation experience including staffing plans delivery timelines solution narratives technical assumptions and inputs to budget discovery.

• Ability to present to teams clients and the wider engineering community both within and outside of Publicis Groupe.

Set Yourself Apart With

• Developer certifications for AWS Google Cloud Microsoft Azure Databricks Snowflake or related cloud and data platforms.

• Demonstrated experience applying AI engineering concepts in practical business environments rather than only academic or research settings.

• Hands-on experience supporting AI/ML and LLM lifecycle needs such as model deployment support monitoring validation shadow deployments release management evaluation infrastructure and data quality measurement for predictive and generative systems.

• Experience using applied AI and large-scale data engineering to solve operational client-facing or transformation-oriented business problems.

• Understanding ofAgile product and delivery methodologies in consulting or client-facing environments.

Benefits of Working Here

• Flexible vacation policy; time is not limitedallocated oraccrued.

• 16 paid holidays throughout the year.

• Generous parental leave and new parent transition program.

• Tuition reimbursement.

• Corporate gift matching program.

Pay Range: $168000 to $252000

The range shown represents a grouping of relevant ranges currently in use at Publicis Sapient. Actual range for this position may differ depending on location and specific skillset required for the work itself. Benefits of working here: Flexible vacation policy; time is not limited allocated or accrued 16 paid holidays throughout the year. Generous parental leave and new parent transition program Tuition reimbursement Corporate gift matching program

As part of our dedication to an inclusive and diverse workforce Publicis Sapient is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity without regard for race color national origin ethnicity gender protected veteran status disability sexual orientation gender identity or religion. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability you may contact us at