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Zynga, a global leader in interactive entertainment and label of Take-Two Interactive, is seeking a Senior Director, Data Platform to lead its centralized data platform and product strategy. This role manages one of the largest data footprints in the gaming industry—billions of daily gameplay events flowing through a cloud-native stack spanning real-time ingestion, petabyte-scale warehousing, experimentation, and self-serve metrics and AI platforms.
You will operate with high autonomy and direct executive sponsorship, acting as a pathfinder to empower global studios to extract maximum value from central data and transform the organization toward an AI-first way of working. This highly visible role is based in Toronto and partners closely with studio leaders, central teams, and executives across Zynga's global labels. Relocation support is available.
Key responsibilities include:
- Crafting and executing data product strategy for Zynga's centralized data products, translating vision into initiatives that empower global studios
- Championing an AI-first approach, pushing teams to innovate and leverage clean, trusted data for advanced AI/ML capabilities
- Leading, mentoring, and growing a diverse global team of approximately 60 across North America, Israel, and India—including Directors, Senior Managers, and non-engineering functions such as Product and Program Management
- Establishing robust data compliance and governance frameworks for a massive, global data footprint
- Guiding the team through organizational change while maintaining global alignment and building effective processes and outcomes
REQUIREMENTS:
- 15+ years in data or software engineering, including 8+ years leading and scaling engineering organizations, with experience managing managers (Directors and Senior Managers)
- Track record leading global, matrixed teams of tenured leaders, with strong executive presence across studios, labels, and executive stakeholders
- Deep engineering background with hands-on IC experience earlier in career; depth to make architectural calls across modern cloud data stack: cloud data warehousing (Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery), streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Spark), orchestration and transformation (Airflow, dbt), and lakehouse/ML platforms (Databricks, SageMaker)
- Proven, hands-on track record of shipping AI/ML systems to production—feature/training pipelines, deployment, and monitoring; familiarity with modern LLM and agentic patterns (RAG, semantic layers, MCP-style tooling) is critical and non-negotiable
- Demonstrated ownership of large-scale, cloud-native data platforms on AWS—modeling, batch and streaming pipelines, cost/performance optimization, reliability (SLOs, observability), and data quality at scale
- Experience scaling semantic/metrics layers and self-serve analytics (dbt, metrics stores, Tableau/Lightdash); familiarity with experimentation platforms and data privacy/compliance frameworks
- Comfort managing non-engineering functions (Product and Production) and translating technical concepts into clear business value for executives and non-engineers
BONUS: Previous leadership experience within the gaming industry; candidates from top-tier tech, consumer tech, or large-scale enterprise tech are highly encouraged to apply.
