Lead Data Platform Engineer

Lead Data Platform Engineer, External Data Analytics

College Board - Technology – InfoSec & Infrastructure

Location: This is a fully remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.

Type: This is a full-time position
About the Team

The External Data Analytics team builds and operates the data platform that powers trusted, timely analytics across College Board 's exam and AP Classwork programs, including AP Classwork's continuous, year-round data needs. We're a small, closely knit, cross-functional team (~7 engineers today, and growing) with a mix of data engineering and full-stack backgrounds. We value ownership, thoughtful automation, clear documentation, pragmatic architecture, and keeping students top of mind in everything we build.
About the Opportunity

As the technical lead for the platform, you'll own architecture end-to-end and serve as the final technical authority on the team's hardest problems, operating a level above a senior IC. You'll stay hands-on yourself, writing production infrastructure-as-code and setting the coding standards the team follows, while leading design and implementation across streaming and batch ingestion, curated analytical data products, and reliable data-consumption patterns. Because our immediate priority is AP Classwork analytics, you'll be designing for continuous, steady-state, year-round throughput and long-running data quality, often working through ambiguity as requirements and priorities evolve; not just a single test-day spike.

You will work with contributing domain teams to establish data contracts and ensure data is accurate, governed, secure, and ready for analysis, making and communicating tradeoffs involving scale, performance, reliability, cost, and operational complexity along the way. You'll also set the standard for how the team uses AI-assisted coding responsibly, establishing review practices and guardrails for AI-generated code, and, as a technical anchor for the team, mentor engineers and raise engineering standards across the platform.
In this role, you will:

- Own the technical direction, architecture, evolution, and reliability of a shared enterprise data and analytics platform, serving as the team's final technical authority and escalation point.

- Lead the hands-on design and implementation of streaming and batch data pipelines supporting real-time and historical analysis, independently writing production infrastructure-as-code (CDK/TypeScript).

- Design curated, governed analytical data products that provide consistent and trusted information for reporting and decision-making, including for a continuous, year-round data load rather than single-event spikes.

- Ensure the platform can scale efficiently while meeting expectations for performance, availability, reliability, and cost, including safe recovery from retries and failures.

- Establish data contracts with contributing teams, including expectations for schemas, data quality, service levels, and change management.

- Embed security, access controls, lineage, classification, auditability, monitoring, and operational readiness into the platform.

- Partner with domain, product, operations, security, and governance stakeholders to translate business and reporting needs into sustainable technical solutions.

- Lead code and design reviews, set and enforce coding standards, mentor engineers across varying experience levels, and promote strong practices in data engineering, automation, observability, and platform reliability.

- Establish and enforce responsible AI-assisted coding practices for the team, including reviewing AI-generated code and setting guardrails so AI-assisted development doesn't compromise shared infrastructure.

- Respond to incidents and drive platform reliability across the team's ser