The Role
Lead and set strategic direction for Business Intelligence, translate strategy into operational plans, manage budgets and financial performance, drive profitable growth, oversee day-to-day BI operations, and lead teams to deliver innovative, market-oriented analytics solutions.
Summary Generated by Built In
The Data Experience (DEx) practice builds the data foundations, pipelines, and products that power Dentsu's media and marketing effectiveness work across Carat, iProspect, and Dentsu X. We are seeking a Director, Data Engineering to lead our offshore (DGS) engineering capability — owning the architecture, quality, and delivery of the data platform that everything downstream depends on.
This is a senior leadership and hands-on engineering role. You will set the standard for how DEx ingests, models, and serves media and marketing data on Databricks, and you will do it as a modern practitioner — using AI-assisted data development (Databricks Genie, Copilot, Claude Code) to move faster and raise quality. You will lead and mentor a team of DGS engineers while staying close enough to the code to set the bar yourself. This role demands deep Databricks expertise and a genuine understanding of what media data means, not just how to move it.
This is a senior leadership and hands-on engineering role. You will set the standard for how DEx ingests, models, and serves media and marketing data on Databricks, and you will do it as a modern practitioner — using AI-assisted data development (Databricks Genie, Copilot, Claude Code) to move faster and raise quality. You will lead and mentor a team of DGS engineers while staying close enough to the code to set the bar yourself. This role demands deep Databricks expertise and a genuine understanding of what media data means, not just how to move it.
Job Description:
Core Skills & RequirementsDatabricks & Data Engineering- Deep, hands-on Databricks expertise: Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow / Delta Live Tables, Medallion architecture, and performance tuning.
- Expert-level SQL and strong Python for data engineering; production experience building and operating pipelines at scale.
- Solid grasp of data modeling, orchestration, data quality, and governance — building for reuse and maintainability, not one-off delivery.
- Experience with the surrounding ecosystem (Azure, lightweight ETL / data-prep tooling such as Trifacta or dbt) is a strong plus.
- Hands-on experience developing data solutions with AI tooling — Databricks Genie, GitHub / Databricks Copilot, Claude Code, or comparable AI coding agents.
- Able to use AI assistants to accelerate pipeline build, transformation logic, and debugging while maintaining correctness, governance, and quality.
- A builder's mindset: comfortable pairing with AI tools as a force multiplier for the team, not a novelty.
You must understand not just how to engineer the data, but what the data means.
- Strong command of media and marketing data: what impressions, spend, clicks, and conversions represent, and how they relate.
- Understanding of how reach and frequency work — served vs. viewable impressions, de-duplicated reach, and frequency capping — and the implications for how data must be modeled.
- Familiarity with conversion tracking and attribution mechanics — pixels, tags, post-click vs. post-view, and lookback windows.
- Knowledge of how media data connects across campaigns, placements, creatives, and channels, and how spend flows through to outcomes.
- Practical experience with media taxonomies and naming conventions as the foundation of trustworthy, joinable data.
- Proven experience leading and developing an engineering team, ideally in an offshore / DGS or global delivery model.
- Ability to set architecture and code standards, review work critically, and raise the quality bar across a team.
- Strong communication across time zones with onshore leads and stakeholders.
- Experience with streaming / near-real-time ingestion patterns.
- Familiarity with trafficking / ad ops platforms (CM360, Prisma, DV360, TTD) and how their data lands in the platform.
- Exposure to semantic / metrics layers and how engineering choices affect downstream reporting (Power BI, dbt metrics).
- Experience in an agency, ad tech, or marketing analytics environment.
- CI/CD, testing, and DataOps practices for data pipelines.
- 12+ years in data engineering, with several years in a leadership or director-level capacity.
- Demonstrated deep Databricks / Lakehouse expertise in production.
- Demonstrated domain knowledge of media and/or marketing data (hard requirement).
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Location:
DGS India - Chennai - Anna Nagar Tyche TowersBrand:
ParagonTime Type:
Full timeContract Type:
PermanentSkills Required
- Strategic business intelligence leadership and strategy development
- Financial management including preparing and monitoring operating budgets
- Operational management of BI functions to ensure efficiency and performance
- Team leadership, people management, and stakeholder liaison across channels
- Design and implementation of business plans and go-to-market service upgrades
dentsu Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about dentsu and has not been reviewed or approved by dentsu.
-
Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave at full pay and caregiver supports (including backup care) are emphasized as standout elements. Feedback suggests family-oriented benefits are a strong part of the package.
-
Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible or unlimited PTO, extensive paid holidays, and a year-end office closure are established components. Feedback suggests time-off policies are generous and add meaningful flexibility.
-
Retirement Support — A large, established 401(k) plan with employer matching is clearly documented. Feedback suggests retirement benefits feel competitive and straightforward.
dentsu Insights
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
We are dentsu. We team together to help brands predict and plan for disruptive future opportunities and create new paths to growth in the sustainable economy. We know people better than anyone else and we use those insights to connect brand, content, commerce and experience, underpinned by modern creativity. We are the network designed for what’s next
