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 & Qualifica