Summary:

Curriculum Associates is seeking a VP, Enterprise Data, Insights & AI Readiness to build the trusted data and semantic intelligence foundation for the company’s next era of growth.

This is a founding enterprise transformation role with the mandate to stand up a modern Data & Insights Center of Excellence, establish CA’s governed semantic layer, and make enterprise data ready for responsible AI, self-service analytics, product innovation, and executive decision-making.

This leader will own the strategy, operating model, and execution roadmap across data engineering, analytics engineering, cloud data platforms, data governance, data quality, data operations, semantic modeling, enterprise analytics, and AI-ready data products. They will turn fragmented data and functional reporting into a scalable enterprise intelligence capability that serves both human and machine consumption.

The role sits at the intersection of education, data, analytics, and responsible AI. It will partner deeply with Product, Engineering, AI Labs, Learning Sciences/Research, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Finance, Operations, Security, Legal, and Compliance to ensure CA’s data is accurate, accessible, secure, privacy-preserving, explainable, and trusted.

Why This Role Is Career-Defining

Few data leadership roles offer this combination of mission, scale, greenfield build, executive visibility, and AI-era relevance. CA has the product footprint, data richness, educator trust, and responsible AI ambition to create one of the most meaningful intelligence foundations in EdTech. This leader will define how data is modeled, governed, accessed, trusted, and activated across the company — creating the semantic and operational backbone for AI-era decision-making.

Mandate, sponsorship & Decision rights

This role carries the executive mandate to build CA’s enterprise data foundation for the AI era. Reporting into the CIO organization, this leader will define the governance model, semantic layer, certified metrics, and operating standards required to make data trusted, reusable, and AI-ready across the company.

The VP will chair or co-chair the enterprise data governance council and partner with Product, Engineering, AI Labs, Research, Security, Legal, Compliance, and business functions to set decision rights for how data is defined, owned, accessed, certified, and used. Their authority includes prioritizing high-value data domains, certifying trusted datasets and KPIs, setting data product standards, and aligning data investments to business value, risk reduction, adoption, and AI readiness.

What you will build in the first 18 months

• Enterprise semantic layer: governed, access controlled, AI-consumable, reusable across products and internal tools
• Data product catalog: defined ownership, SLAs, quality metrics
• AI data readiness assessment and roadmap across all major data domains
• Self-service analytics capability that measurably shifts the team from reactive reporting to proactive insight delivery
• Global team structure (US + India) operating as a high-performing unit

Essential Duties/Responsibilities:

Enterprise Data Strategy

• Establish and own the enterprise data roadmap — spanning engineering, governance, quality, and insight delivery — with AI readiness as the organizing principle, not an afterthought.
• Drive modernization of the data platform stack (Snowflake, Azure, Databricks) and the intelligence layer above it — from BI tools to AI-native consumption patterns including natural-language querying, copilots, and agentic workflows

AI-Ready Semantic layer & data products

• Lead the design and implementation of CA’s enterprise semantic layer, including canonical data models, common business definitions, enterprise KPIs, metric logic, governed datasets, business glossary, metadata, lineage, and reusable semantic objects.
• Establish trusted, AI-consumable data products that can power BI, self-service analytics, natural-language querying, copilots, AI agents, advanced analytics, research workflows, and operational automation.
• Partner with Security, Legal, Compliance to ensure data foundations support responsible, privacy-preserving, explainable, and human-centered AI.
• Define standards for AI-readiness across data quality, documentation, ontology, access control, verified answers, model evaluation, semantic consistency, and human-in-the-loop validation.
• Drive the transition from dashboard-centric reporting to a governed enterprise intelligence layer that enables proactive insights, decision automation, and trusted AI-assisted decision making.

Data Engineering & Data Platform Leadership

• Own the enterprise data architecture and lead the build-out of scalable, secure data pipelines, models, and integration frameworks in partnership with Engineering and Cloud teams
• Establish data observability, orchestration standards, and SLA-driven operations to ensure timely, accurate, and trustworthy data availability

Data Governance & Data Quality

• Establish a strong data governance operating model including ownership, stewardship, standards, and policies.
• Implement frameworks for data quality measurement, metadata management, cataloguing, lineage, and controlled access.
• Establish AI-era governance standards including model data lineage, prompt data traceability, student data protection in AI systems, and responsible use policies that satisfy regulatory and ethical requirements in an EdTech context.

Data Operations & Platform Management

• Own end-to-end data operations, focusing on system reliability, SLAs, monitoring, performance optimization, and operational excellence.
• Set up incident management, change management, and service-level processes for data platforms.

Enterprise Insights & Analytics

• Position the semantic layer as the single source of trusted, reusable data assets — enabling self-service analytics, AI-powered features, and natural-language interfaces to draw from the same governed foundation
• Lead a global team of analysts and insight specialists to deliver actionable dashboards, reports, and advanced analytics.
• Promote data storytelling and build a culture of insight-driven decision making across all functions.

Leadership & Change Enablement

• Serve as the executive-level data thought partner to the CIO, CEO, and business leaders — translating data and AI capabilities into business strategy and ensuring data investment decisions are tied to measurable outcomes
• Build, coach, and scale a high-performing global team across US and India.
• Influence and drive organizational adoption of analytics platforms and data-driven behaviors.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and data literacy.

Measurement & Business Impact

• Own the measurement framework for CA's data transformation — defining leading indicators (platform adoption, semantic layer coverage, data quality scores) and lagging indicators (business decisions accelerated, AI products enabled, analyst time reclaimed)
• Demonstrate ROI on data investment to executive leadership through a regular cadence of outcomes reporting, not activity reporting

Required Job Skills:

Technical & Functional Expertise

• Experience designing or leading enterprise semantic layer, metrics layer, business ontology, or governed data product capabilities.
• Proven ability to build AI-ready data foundations, including metadata, lineage, data quality, access controls, business definitions, and reusable semantic models.
• Experience with analytics engineering practices, including dimensional modeling, dbt-style transformation frameworks, data contracts, documentation, testing, and data observability.
• Familiarity with natural-language analytics, AI copilots, agentic workflows, RAG-enabled data experiences, or AI-powered BI use cases.
• Strong understanding of responsible data and AI practices, especially privacy, security, explainability, ethical use, and governance in regulated or sensitive data environments.
• Ability to influence executive stakeholders and establish enterprise-wide standards in a matrixed organization.
• Strong command of relational and cloud-based data platforms (Snowflake, Azure Data Services, Databricks, etc.).

Leadership & Strategic Skills

• Demonstrated track record of zero-to-one builds — standing up a CoE, data platform, or governance capability in an organization where it didn't previously exist at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale global teams in a matrixed, fast-moving environment.
• Strong communication and data storytelling skills with the ability to influence senior executives.
• Experience driving enterprise adoption of new tools, platforms, and ways of working.

Industry & Business Acumen

• Experience supporting diverse business functions such as Sales, Service, Revenue Operations, Finance, Marketing or Customer Fulfillment.
• Prior experience in an EdTech, SaaS, consumer, or digital enterprise environment is a plus.
• Strong understanding of operational processes, KPIs, and business performance metrics.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Analytics, Business, Computer Science, or a related field (Master’s preferred).
• 15+ years of experience in analytics, business intelligence, or data insights roles.
• 7+ years of experience leading high-performing analytics or insights teams.

Benefits and Pay Range:

Pay Range – This role’s range is $149,500 - $275,500. The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that Curriculum Associates considers in making compensation decisions based on our Compensation Philosophy. Actual base pay within that range will vary based upon several factors including, but not limited to, prior experience and relevant skill sets. This role is also eligible to participate in the company bonus plan. The Company recognizes that minimum wage varies by location and will ensure all compensation decisions comply with applicable state and local laws.

Benefits – Benefit eligible employees (and their families) are covered by medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance. Employees can enroll in our company’s 401k plan and receive an employer match. Employees have access to a flexible vacation and sick policy in addition to twelve paid holidays and a winter office closure between Christmas and New Year's, as well as a number of additional perks and benefits.

• Travel: <15%
• Working Environment: Typical office environment.
• Classification: Exempt
• People Manager/Individual Contributor: People Manager
• Hours: 40