Director, Data Management

The Director, Data Management position exists to lead the enterprise data function for Focus on the Family. This position builds and governs the data foundation on which the ministry depends: documented architecture, a trusted cloud data platform, certified reporting, and governed data assets that let ministry, advancement, marketing, care, content, and finance leaders make sound decisions. The Director is expected to be personally hands-on in the platform while leading and developing the team. The role is architecture- and documentation-led rather than report-production-led and is accountable for establishing what the organization has never had in durable form: documented data architecture, source-to-target lineage, a business glossary with certified metric definitions, and runbooks that remove key-person risk. The Director owns Snowflake, leads modernization of the legacy SSRS estate, owns data initiatives across the Salesforce ecosystem, and owns the data-readiness posture that makes AI safe to use. The central team owns platform, architecture, standards, and governance process; business and ministry domains own the meaning and stewardship of their data. Because the team today is weighted toward SSRS and SQL development, growing existing staff into data engineering and governance capability is a core expectation of this role.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities:

Architecture and documentation:

• Owns enterprise data architecture: conceptual, logical, and physical models; source-to-target mappings; integration patterns; master and reference data strategy.

• Maintains the enterprise data documentation set as a standing deliverable: architecture decision records, data dictionary, business glossary, lineage, classification register, and runbooks

• Enforces the standard that nothing enters production without documented owner, purpose, lineage, refresh cadence, quality checks, classification, and access policy.

• Reduces key-person risk in mission-critical data assets to a measurable target through documentation and cross-training.

Enterprise data platform:

• Owns the Snowflake platform: environment architecture, access patterns, modeling and naming standards, masking and row-level security, tagging, retention, and observability.

• Remains personally hands-on in SQL, modeling, and transformation work; sets technical patterns by building them.

• Owns ingestion, transformation, and orchestration standards, including dbt or equivalent, version control, testing, and CI/CD for data.

• Owns data initiatives across the Salesforce ecosystem: CRM and Marketing Cloud data architecture, identity and household resolution, consent data integrity, and flows to and from Snowflake.

• Owns platform cost management and coordinates the data roadmap with the infrastructure cloud migration.

• Maintains data quality automation, pipeline monitoring, and data incident response.

Reporting and analytics:

• Leads inventory, rationalization, and selective modernization of the legacy SSRS estate; retires reports that do not earn their keep.

• Establishes certified enterprise metrics and a semantic layer so executive, board, and departmental numbers reconcile.

• Builds managed self-service: certified datasets, standards, templates, and coaching for analysts across the organization.

• Runs a prioritized data roadmap with visible capacity and published tradeoffs; treats durable data assets as products, not one-off requests.

Governance, trust, and privacy:

• Operates the hub-and-spoke governance model; names executive data owners and stewards in every critical domain and runs the cadence that holds them accountable.

• Runs the data steward working group and maintains a decision log for enterprise definitions and source-of-truth determinations.

• Owns the data domain model, glossary, catalog, metadata, lineage, classification standards, and data quality issue lifecycle.

• Owns the data-readiness posture for AI: classification, lineage, quality, consent status, and access control. Required reviewer for AI and analytics use cases involving donor, family, minor, or care data.

• Partners with Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Legal, and Privacy on GDPR, CCPA/CPA, PCI, and donor data obligations. Cybersecurity owns identity and policy; this role owns technical implementation inside the platform.

• Enforces conformance to content taxonomy and metadata labeling standards across MAM and DAM. Content and enterprise architecture own the taxonomy; this role owns enforcement and measurement.

• Upholds ministry trust boundaries. Donor, family, minor, and counseling data are governed with explicit restrictions, not collapsed into one unrestricted profile.

Team leadership and delivery:

• Leads, coaches, and develops the team; sets priorities, assigns work, and holds the team to documented standards.

• Assesses team capability honestly and builds a realistic plan to grow existing SSRS and SQL staff into data engineering, analytics engineering, and governance roles.

• Determines the future shape and staffing needs of the function and makes the case for investment as the capability matures.

• Sets department goals against the enterprise data strategy; reports progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the CDIO and executive governance.

• Partners with the IT PMO on funded project delivery while owning the continuous data roadmap directly. Manages data platform vendors.

Other Duties/Responsibilities:

• Perform other duties as assigned

Managerial Breadth/Scope of Job:

• Manages professional and technical staff at various levels.

• Accountable for the data platform and analytics budget, including cloud consumption and licensing., Exemplifies Ephesians 5:1-2, “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us…”

Pursues the Great Commission given by Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Is a consistent witness for Jesus Christ; maintains a courteous, Christ-like attitude in dealing with people within and outside of Focus; adheres to the Standard of Moral Conduct (http://media.focusonthefamily.com/fotf/pdf/about-us/human-resources/moral-policy.pdf) and Statement of Faith (http://www.focusonthefamily.com/about/foundational-values#values) ; upholds Focus on the Family’s ministry in prayer

Prays personally for Focus on the Family’s staff and constituents and may occasionally lead in a public prayer

• Self-motivated; requires little direct supervision; coachable

• Disciplined and organized, with a bias toward writing things down

• Communicates well; holds a position under pressure, then implements the decision governance reaches; Willing to do the work personally as well as lead it

• Comfortable leading change amid legacy systems, real constraints, and high stewardship expectations

Knowledge/Experience - Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Science, Analytics, or equivalent experience and certification (Equivalent Experience in lieu of education is acceptable)

• 7-10 years of experience in data management, engineering, analytics, or business intelligence, including at least 3 years leading or formally mentoring technical staff

• Hands-on ownership of a cloud data platform in production. Snowflake strongly preferred; Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, or Fabric considered

• Ownership of enterprise data architecture, including documented modeling, source-to-target mapping, and integration patterns

• Track record modernizing a legacy reporting estate, including rationalization and the stakeholder change management it requires

• Has established data governance that was adopted in practice; named owners and stewards, glossary, certified definitions, working data quality process; not a policy document alone

• Advanced SQL and current fluency in dbt or equivalent, ELT tooling, version control, and CI/CD for data

• Experience with sensitive or regulated data and the access controls, classification, and audit it requires

• Experience developing technical staff onto new platforms and ways of working

• Able to explain architecture and tradeoffs to non-technical ministry and business leaders

Knowledge/Experience - Preferred:

• Ability to build predictive or statistical models on governed data, and interest in growing that capability over time

• Salesforce and Marketing Cloud data models, Salesforce Data Cloud

• Power BI or Microsoft Fabric, including SSRS migration experience

• Data catalog, lineage, and data quality tooling; master data management and identity resolution

• Nonprofit, ministry, media and content, or membership organization experience

• Workday and enterprise finance and giving system data

• Asset management metadata, content taxonomy, and semantic governance

• GDPR, CCPA/CPA, PCI, and donor data stewardship expectations

Skills, Abilities, and Special Talents/Gifts:

• Strong written communication: produces architecture documentation and standards others can use

• Translates ambiguous business questions into clear data requirements, and declines requests that do not serve the strategy

• Manages numerous and sometimes conflicting objectives and priorities

• Understands core ministry and business operations and the interactions among departments

Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Focus on the Family has nearly 700 employees who work to achieve the mission of enriching the lives of families, engaging the culture, advocating for life and spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The work is meaningful, the culture is rewarding, and the purpose is eternal.