Head of Data Platform Product & Program Management

Head of Data Platform Product & Program Management

As the Head of Platform Product & Program Management, you are the Chief Architect of the Sovereign Platform Roadmap. Your primary responsibility is to define, prioritize, and evolve the product strategy that dictates the work of the Data & AI Platform and Infrastructure team. You are the "Strategic Glue" that connects commercial data product ambitions with technical execution, ensuring that our infrastructure is a purpose‑built factory for production‑grade self‑service analytics and ML intelligence.

• Primary Ownership of the Platform Roadmap
  • Technical Strategy Lead:
    Create and maintain the definitive Data & AI Platform Product Roadmap. This roadmap is the leading document that guides all infrastructure, data engineering, and tooling work.
  • Work Direction:
    Ensure the Data & AI Platform and Infrastructure team is focused on high‑value features – such as Medallion lifecycle automation, Unity Catalog expansion, and MLOps capability that unlock value for the entire company.
  • Productization of Infra:
    Treat the platform as a world‑class internal product. Ensure the roadmap includes features that simplify the "Developer Experience" for data scientists and analysts.
• Commercial‑to‑Technical Translation
  • Intake & Synthesis:
    Work closely with Commercial Data Product Owners to understand their go‑to‑market roadmaps.
  • Requirements Engineering:
    Formalize how commercial needs translate into specific platform requirements. You ensure that when a business unit wants a new "Player LTV" product, the platform roadmap has already accounted for the necessary "Gold Layer" data and inference engines.
• Stakeholder Diplomacy & System Integration
  • Downstream Orchestration:
    Manage the critical technical handshakes. Collaborate with Extraction & Collection teams to align data ingestion with platform standards, and with Downstream Application teams to ensure the platform’s outputs (API/Intelligence) are easily consumable.
  • External Alignment:
    Serve as the primary technical diplomat, ensuring that the Sovereign Platform integrates seamlessly with the broader Scientific Games ecosystem.
• Execution & Program Management
  • Operational Heart:
    Lead the Agile rituals (Sprint Planning, Stand‑ups, Backlog Grooming) for the platform and DS organizations.
  • Team Leadership:
    Manage a high‑performing team of Program Managers and POs who oversee specific work streams of the Sovereign initiative across our hubs.
  • Velocity Tracking:
    Own the reporting of sprint health, platform velocity, and "Lead Time to Value," providing leadership team with a transparent view of progress against data strategic targets.
• Self‑Service & Production‑Grade Tooling
  • Glue for Self‑Service:
    Design the roadmap for the Semantic Layer and Self‑Service Reporting tools. Your goal is to empower analysts and non‑technical users to build their own products on top of your platform.
  • Production Stability:
    Ensure the roadmap prioritizes the reliability and quality of platform components to support high‑stakes, real‑time ML products in production.
• Experience:
  
  10+ years in Technical Product or Program Management, specifically owning roadmaps for large‑scale Data or Cloud Platforms.
• Roadmap Authority:
  Proven track record of translating complex business goals into a multi‑year technical roadmap that led an engineering organization to success.
• Stakeholder Mastery:
  Elite ability to manage the "push and pull" of technical diplomacy between Extraction, Platform, and Application teams.
• Agile Leadership:
  Deep expertise in running Agile  are a practitioner who knows how to keep a global engineering team in sync.
• Architectural Intuition:
  You understand the Databricks/Lakehouse ecosystem and the Medallion Architecture well enough to know what is technically feasible and what is "gold plating."

The physical demands described here are representative of those 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 sit, stand,…