Director of Data Engineering & AI Enablement

$110,561.00 - $143,729.00/annually, DOE

125

Monday - Friday, 8am - 5pm
Summer Hours: Monday - Thursday, 7am-6pm

12 Months

10 Colleges. Unlimited Opportunities.

The Maricopa County Community College District is one of the largest community college systems in the nation. Home to 10 individually accredited community colleges and 31 satellite locations, we proudly serve students in every corner of the Valley. Each day, our dedicated faculty, staff, and administrators, live out our vision—creating excellence in education for a better world.

We focus on people—not profits.
With 100% acceptance, zero rejections, and affordable tuition, we provide the flexibility and support our students need to succeed in and beyond the classroom. Discover how we’re changing college.

We don’t just support our community—we help build it.
We are the largest provider of workforce development training in the state. The activities of our colleges and their students support one out of every 28 jobs in Maricopa County. Learn about our economic impact.

We believe our employees are our most valuable asset.
Our 10 colleges and District Office support nearly 10,000 jobs and careers throughout Greater Phoenix.

Join us in making a real difference in the lives of over 140,000 college students each year.

Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) is committed to providing a competitive and comprehensive benefits program that supports our employees' and their families' health and well-being. Therefore, the MCCCD benefits support every stage of life and are designed to meet the diverse needs of our community. Explore the wide range of benefits and perks available to eligible employees at MCCCD:

Affordable and Comprehensive Benefits Package:

• Nationwide Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
• Paid Time Off: Vacation, Sick Leave, and Personal Time
• 20 Paid Observed Holidays
• Company-paid Life Insurance, AD&D, and Short-Term Disability plans, with the option to purchase supplemental coverage
• Arizona State Retirement System (ASRS) Pension, including Long Term Disability and Retiree Health Insurance with 100% employer-matching contributions
• Optional Retirement Plans: 403(b), 457(b), Roth 403(b), Roth 457(b)
• Tuition Reimbursement for employees and dependents
• Annual Professional Development Funding
• Flexible Work Schedules

Employee Health & Wellness Programs:

• District-Wide Wellness Program with Workshops and Webinars
• Monthly Health & Wellness Calendar and Newsletter
• Virta Diabetes Reversal Program, Support Groups, and Diabetes Empowerment Education Programs
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Sight-On-Site Eye Care Services
• Mobile On-Site Mammography Screenings
• Pre-Retirement Planning Events
• Qualifying Employer for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (potential loan forgiveness for federal Direct Loans after meeting repayment requirements and working full-time for an eligible employer)

Information Technology Services (ITS) at the MCCCD seeks a dynamic Director of Data Engineering & AI Enablement. Reporting to the CIO, you'll craft the strategy and practical architecture for modern data platforms, drive AI adoption, and forge a data-driven culture that delivers real-world impact in student services, institutional effectiveness, and district operations.

This new position is a transformative opportunity to become a key part of our expanding organization: you will build a team from the ground up, evaluate and integrate AI tools and services, and shepherd AI/ML use cases from ideation to production—while establishing ethical and governance guardrails. At the same time, you will lead the modernization of MCCCD’s data engineering and business intelligence ecosystems, including dashboarding, data warehousing, data lakes, and robust enterprise database infrastructure. You’ll define long-term roadmaps, budget and resource plans, and partner with leadership across colleges to align technical strategy with educational mission. If you are energized by leading innovation, shaping outcomes at scale, and coaching high-performing teams, this role offers an unmatched chance to build the future of AI and data at MCCCD.

The ideal candidate for Director is someone who possesses tactical and influential skills, with deep technical expertise working with python and data transformations, structured and unstructured data, and building a team. If you’re looking to advance to the next stage in your Data/AI career, apply to this role today.

Relocation assistance will be considered for the selected candidate.

People / Team / Project Leadership (30 %)

• Plan, organize, assign, supervise, review, and evaluate work of staff.
• Identify training needs and promote professional growth.
• Build, lead, and develop a team of data and AI professionals—fostering collaboration, innovation, and agility.
• Hold team members accountable for execution and deliverables.
• Lead recruiting, onboarding, and retention strategies for AI/data engineering talent.
• Mentor staff on technical best practices, career progression, and cross-functional engagement.
• Lead multiple cross-functional teams supporting AI, data engineering, business intelligence, and enterprise databases.

Data Strategy & Platform Architecture (30 %)

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data infrastructure for analytics, operational systems, and AI applications.
• Define district-wide data strategy in collaboration with institutional research and academic leadership.
• Ensure alignment with data governance, security, and privacy best practices.
• Evaluate architectures (lakehouse, data mesh, hybrid cloud) and select frameworks suited for AI at scale.
• Oversee integration with student information systems (SIS), LMS platforms, and other education ecosystems.
• Direct the design and maintenance of enterprise data warehouses, data lakes, and semantic layers for BI use cases.
• Ensure the scalability, availability, and performance of centralized database systems, including both structured and unstructured data stores.
• Lead the development and governance of business intelligence environments, dashboards, and self-service reporting platforms (e.g., Tableau, Power BI).
• Oversee foundational architecture to support LLM and GenAI infrastructure, including prompt pipelines, embeddings, and secure data routing.

AI Enablement & Innovation (25 %)

• Identify and drive AI/ML use cases district-wide, including prototypes, POCs, production models.
• Promote ethical AI practices: bias mitigation, interpretability, monitoring, and transparency.
• Manage end-to-end MLOps—including feature stores, model registry, CI/CD, and observability metrics.
• Evaluate and deploy GenAI tools, pretrained models, and third-party services to accelerate value.
• Partner with academic innovation teams to evaluate the use of LLMs in tutoring, instructional design, and administrative workflows.
• Direct LLM architecture, including embedding strategies, vector databases, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
• Collaborate with cloud engineers and data scientists to operationalize AI workloads securely and at scale.

Cross-College Data Collaboration (10 %)

• Serve as liaison between district ITS, college IR/data teams to align goals and tools.
• Establish shared data definitions, pipelines, and interoperability district-wide.
• Create communities of practice to build data literacy and AI readiness across staff and faculty.
• Lead workshops and training on data engineering, AI use cases, and governance essentials.
• Facilitate district wide collaboration on shared BI tools, enterprise dashboards, and institutional reporting requirements.

Administrative (5 %)

• Manage a budget of tools and resources within policy.
• Participate in and may lead shared governance efforts.
• Lead District-wide Data Governance efforts.
• Define budget strategies and ROI metrics for AI investments and vendor engagements.
• Oversee contracts, renewals, and vendor partnerships for BI platforms, cloud data tools, and database technologies.
• Develop performance monitoring strategies for enterprise databases, ETL jobs, and data delivery SLAs.
• Performs related duties as assigned
  

Bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited institution in any field and six (6) years of professional experience in area related to the intended assignment, which includes two (2) years of supervisory or management experience.

OR

An equivalent combination of the conferred degree, education, certification and directly related full-time work experience as described above sufficient to successfully perform the essential duties of the job such as those listed above, unless otherwise subject to any other requirements set forth in law or regulation, may be considered.

Technical & AI-Leadership Expertise

• Demonstrated experience selecting and implementing automated data ingestion pipelines—e.g. leveraging tools like Apache Airflow, dbt, Kafka, Spark, Azure Data Factory.
• Proven success leading predictive analytics or AI strategies at an organizational scale—turning data into actionable insights across divisions or campuses.
• Expertise building data platforms in cloud environments—AWS, Azure, and/or GCP—leveraging data lakes, lakehouses, and modern warehousing patterns.
• Experience integrating data engineering and AI workflows with SIS, Learning Management Systems, or EdTech platforms to support learning analytics or student interventions.
• Skilled in translating complex technical capabilities into roadmaps aligned with institutional business and educational goals.
• Experience building or upskilling a diverse team to enable the transition from legacy tools and applications to a cloud-based, AI focused platform.

Data Engineering, BI, and Database Architecture

• Hands-on expertise with data pipeline development using SQL, Python, Spark, dbt, or cloud-native tools.
• Experience designing and maintaining enterprise data warehouses and data lakes for real-time and batch workloads.
• Knowledge of BI and dashboarding platforms (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, Looker), with experience creating centralized, self-service analytics environments.
• Demonstrated success overseeing large-scale relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, MongoDB), including database health monitoring, scalability, and recovery.
• Understanding of and experience with database administration in a cloud environment (e.g. AWS RDS) including database migration, health and performance monitoring, and backup and recovery.
• Familiarity with data cataloging, metadata management, and semantic modeling.
• Experience developing architecture to support LLM applications, including vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Pinecone), prompt chaining, and token optimization strategies.

Coding, ML & Pipeline Orchestration

• Proficiency with AI/ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn; and experience with production MLOps best practices (model registry, feature store, continuous deployment)

Governance, Ethics & Compliance

• Deep understanding of data governance, privacy, compliance, and security in public-sector or higher-ed contexts—particularly FERPA, HIPAA, and student data privacy.
• Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), such as differential privacy, anonymization, or federated learning.

Communications & Strategy

• Experience presenting technical strategy and ROI to executive leadership, board members, or shared governance bodies.
• Strong skills in bridging technical and non-technical stakeholders using data visualization/BI tools to create clarity and buy-in.
• Exceptional leadership, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration—capable of influencing district stakeholders and creating communities of practice.

Education & Prior Experience

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field preferred.
• Experience leading large-scale data modernization or AI adoption initiatives in multi-campus organizations, including vendor selection and management.
• Proven budget oversight, strategic planning, and P&L or ROI management experience tied to AI/technology investments.
  

There is a mandatory minimum in-office expectation, currently two days onsite, in which the District reserves the right to update at any time.

The selected candidate will need to reside in the Phoenix area or relocate within six months of hire.

This role may involve after hours work and non-regular business hours.

This leader will be measured on ITS values, leadership principles, and job performance areas as referenced above.

May be required to sit for a prolonged period of time; viewing a computer monitor.

May be required to present in large meetings and sponsored events.

ITS does not sponsor individuals for any type of work visas.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to submit a cover letter that details how the applicant meets the minimum and desired qualifications. A cover letter may further highlight an applicant's knowledge, skill and abilities. All minimum requirements must be met at the time of the application.

Additional materials will not be accepted after the job posting has closed.

Missing materials or incomplete employment history will not be considered.

Please ensure your materials clearly provide the following information.

• Clearly illustrate how prior experience, knowledge and education meet the minimum and desired qualifications for this position.
• Indicate whether former or current employment is Full-Time or;
• Part-Time employment (must include number of hours worked)
• Provide employment history in a month/year format (e.g., 09/07 to 10/11) including job title, job duties, for each position held and name of employer for each position.
• Three professional references, preferably current and/or former supervisors. If references are not provided in resume upon application, they will be requested at time of interview.

Open until filled

First Review Monday, September 29, 2025

Applications received after the review date may not be screened

Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) will not discriminate, nor tolerate discrimination in employment or education, against any applicant, employee, or student because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status (including document abuse), age, disability, veteran status or genetic information.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

The policy of the MCCCD is to provide an educational, employment, and business environment free of gender discrimination. Incidents of misconduct should be reported to the college Title IX Coordinator, as outlined in policy, contact information is available at this link Title IX Coordinators.

The Clery Act is a Federal law requiring United States Colleges and Universities to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses. Crime reporting data for each of the Maricopa Community Colleges, as required under the Clery Act, is available at this link Clery Act.