Senior Manager, Data Strategy
Velir is an established mid-sized agency with a top-tier portfolio of clients, ranging from the world’s largest non-profits to Fortune 500 brands. As of 2023, Velir acquired Brooklyn Data Company, a premier data and analytics consultancy focused on leadership, process improvement, implementation, and advanced analytics.
At Velir, we believe people are our greatest asset. Our culture is built on a foundation of trust, collaboration, and continued improvement. We strive for excellence in everything we do, embracing challenges as opportunities for growth. Our success is driven by a shared passion for making a positive impact on our customers, our communities and each other. We are a remote first company that offers competitive pay and excellent benefits.
Overview
The Senior Manager of Data Strategy leads end-to-end delivery for client engagements with moderate to high technical and organizational complexity, serving as the primary client-facing engagement lead. The role requires working fluency across the modern data stack, including ingestion, warehousing, transformation, and BI/reporting, so they can lead technical discovery, articulate platform tradeoffs, and help clients and internal teams reach sound architecture decisions. They partner with technical leadership on the most complex calls, while independently owning the lower-risk ones.
The Senior Manager of Data Strategy also frames the roadmap around the client's business goals, the urgency behind them, and the impact of acting or not, so priorities are justified by outcomes and not just scope. They own delivery governance across multiple workstreams and engagements, managing cross-team dependencies and escalation paths, and are accountable for the outcome of every engagement they lead.
Responsibilities
Strategic Vision: You are responsible for communicating the vision of our data solutions, creating buy-in for the product vision internally and with clients.
Leads discovery and problem framing across workstreams, meeting with key client stakeholders to translate vision and business requirements into technical and analytical requirements
Frames the roadmap around the client’s business goals, the urgency behind them, and the impact of acting (or not)
Weighs the client’s AI readiness, including data quality, governance, and semantic layer maturity, alongside reporting and BI needs when shaping engagement priorities
Delivers regular internal and external project status reports to key stakeholders and executives
Develops data solutions positioning strategies, including business development initiatives such as product partnerships, proposal writing, client extensions, and other revenue-generating activities
Cross-Team Collaboration: You are responsible for collaborating with other functional departments to ensure alignment with the goals of the data engagement.
Submits staffing requests to Resource Management to ensure the right team is in place to deliver against client needs
Works with functional teams to design data architecture for clients and recommend appropriate infrastructure and tools; partners with technical leadership on complex or higher-risk architecture calls while independently handling more routine ones
Manages cross-team dependencies and escalation paths across workstreams, and keeps developers across those workstreams supported and engaged
Engagement Delivery: You are responsible for translating our data solutions strategy into detailed requirements for other functional teams.
Serves as the primary point of contact for managing, building, and maintaining positive client relationships
Owns delivery governance across multiple workstreams/engagements, managing project schedules and team workload to optimize capacity and velocity
Drives the successful delivery of client projects within defined budget, schedule, and scope with outstanding client satisfaction
Manages the sprint board for each engagement, including backlog management, planning and retrospectives.
Proactively identifies, tracks, and mitigates issues and risks, and provides strategies and recommendations
Helps shape and scope account expansion (extensions, change orders), including AI-readiness assessments, in partnership with Client Services, contributing delivery and technical input while CS continues to lead overall account strategy
Technical Skills
Tool requirements: Intermediate proficiency across the core components of a modern data platform:
Data ingestion SaaS (e.g., Fivetran, Stitch)
Massively parallel processing data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks)
Data transformation tools (e.g., dbt, SQLMesh)
Cloud-forward business intelligence platform (e.g., Tableau, Sigma, Looker)
Leads low-to-moderate technical discoveries and articulates platform tradeoffs, helping stakeholders reach a decision; partners with technical leadership on complex or higher-risk architecture calls while independently handling more routine ones
Assesses whether a client’s data models and pipelines are structured to support downstream AI and agentic use cases, such as clean entity definitions, feature-ready marts, and complete metadata, as part of infrastructure recommendations
Understands how the pieces above fit together to deliver value to the client, including the ability (which may include asking functional peers for support) to weigh pros and cons from both a technical and business perspective. Senior Manager of Data Strategy are expected to deliver and articulate infrastructure recommendations aligned with a client’s business objectives.
Agile Professional: Well-equipped to tackle unforeseen situations and capable of jumping into projects and teams at any point in their development. May teach or mentor other managers on setting Agile goals, developing viable plans, and implementing Agile approaches, blending Agile with other PM frameworks as needed to ensure project delivery.
Skills & Qualifications
8–12 years of experience independently leading complex and broad-ranging data projects, across dimensions including cross-functional, multi-geographic, and long-duration engagements
Strong project management skills, including experience operating in and building Agile and other frameworks
Strong analytical, critical thinking, and creative capabilities
Strong knowledge of the modern data stack and its components, including how to configure it and how it fits with non-modern data technologies (e.g., on-prem vs. cloud)
Working familiarity with how AI and agentic workflows consume data (e.g., semantic layers), enough to evaluate architecture tradeoffs credibly
Hands-on experience as an analyst, analytics engineer, data engineer, or similar
Organized and process-oriented
Available for occasional client travel, up to 10% of the time
Ability to speak to all levels of prospective clients: strategic and tactical decision-makers
Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
Physical Requirements
Frequent sitting at a desk performing work on a computer
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions
Compensation Range: $150,000 - $170,000 annually
Please note that compensation packages are finalized after the interview process is concluded. We use a competency-based approach to base pay, which means it is based on the competencies and skills demonstrated for this role.
Core Company Values
Take the Long View - Ensure the company is built to last
Be Courageous - Make the right decisions even when they aren't the easiest decisions
Be Genuine - Bring honesty and authenticity to all that you do
Work with Focus + Passion - Display purpose and pride in your work and never stop learning
As an equal opportunity employer, we are firmly committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our hiring efforts. We recognize that we need team members from all backgrounds and experiences to successfully shape a positive employee experience as well as deliver our product and service solutions. To that end, we actively seek candidates who can bring diverse experiences and backgrounds to our team. We know that complex factors and systemic bias can get in the way of us meeting strong candidates, so please don't hesitate to apply even if you're not 100% sure.
At this time, Velir does not sponsor candidates and unfortunately cannot accept those on OPT or CPT.