Director, Data Lead
Boston MA, United States
athenahealth
Join 150K providers on the largest connected network in healthcare. See how we’re making connections that improve patient outcomes & clinician experiences.Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Director, Data Lead
About Epocrates
epocrates is a free clinical reference app used by over 1M doctors and health care providers annually to make the best patient care decisions about medication and treatment. With the epocrates+ paid offering, subscribers can access additional premium clinical content for a monthly or annual fee.
Our multi-disciplinary team of SMEs -- front and backend engineers, product management veterans, visual designers, UX researchers, data experts, and more -- work together to create a product for health care providers that enables them to deliver the best possible care to their patients while saving valuable time.
About the Role
We are looking for a Director of Data to lead our data strategy, infrastructure, and team as we scale and turn our data into a product. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for overseeing data engineering, analytics, governance, and data monetization initiatives. You will define how data is collected, stored, analyzed, and transformed into a business asset—both for internal decision-making and external revenue-generating opportunities.
You will work closely with product, engineering, marketing, finance, and executive leadership to build a best-in-class data organization that enables data-driven decision-making and supports our growth, operational efficiency, and data monetization strategy.
Key Responsibilities
1. Data Strategy & Business Impact
• Develop and execute a company-wide data strategy aligned with business objectives.
• Lead the monetization of data, developing and scaling data-as-a-product initiatives (e.g., APIs, analytics platforms, AI-driven insights).
• Define and track data-driven KPIs that support growth, retention, and operational efficiencies.
• Partner with executive leadership to embed data-driven decision-making across the organization.
2. Data Infrastructure & Engineering
• Own and scale our data architecture, pipelines, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Oversee the development and maintenance of data lakes, warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), and ETL processes.
• Ensure scalable, reliable, and secure data infrastructure to support both internal and external data products.
• Drive innovation in data integration, real-time analytics, and AI/ML applications.
3. Data Productization & Monetization
• Work with product and engineering teams to develop, package, and sell data products.
• Define pricing models, customer access, and API integrations for data-as-a-service offerings.
• Ensure customer-facing data products are high-quality, reliable, and provide clear value.
• Manage data partnerships, licensing, and external collaborations.
4. Data Governance, Security & Compliance
• Establish strong data governance frameworks to ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA if applicable).
• Implement data privacy policies and best practices for data usage and access.
• Ensure ethical and responsible AI & data use, especially for external data monetization.
5. Leadership & Team Development
• Build, manage, and mentor a high-performing data team, including data engineers, analysts, and data scientists.
• Foster a data-driven culture across the organization, enabling self-service analytics where possible.
• Define and scale the Hub-and-Spoke data team structure, ensuring both governance and business alignment.
Key Qualifications
✅ 10+ years of experience in data leadership roles, ideally within Media, SaaS, fintech, or data-driven businesses.
✅ Strong expertise in data infrastructure, engineering, and analytics platforms.
✅ Experience building and scaling data teams in fast-growing organizations.
✅ Proven track record of turning data into a product (monetization through APIs, analytics platforms, or AI/ML-driven insights).
✅ Deep understanding of data governance, security, and compliance frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).
✅ Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
✅ Ability to align data strategy with business objectives and make trade-offs when necessary.
➕ Experience with subscription-based business models.
➕ Knowledge of AI/ML applications and automation in data analytics.
➕ Exposure to pricing strategies for data monetization.
➕ Experience working with external data partnerships and licensing models
About athenahealth
Here’s our vision: To create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
What’s unique about our locations?
From an historic, 19th century arsenal to a converted, landmark power plant, all of athenahealth’s offices were carefully chosen to represent our innovative spirit and promote the most positive and productive work environment for our teams. Our 10 offices across the United States and India — plus numerous remote employees — all work to modernize the healthcare experience, together.
Our company culture might be our best feature.
We don't take ourselves too seriously. But our work? That’s another story. athenahealth develops and implements products and services that support US healthcare: It’s our chance to create healthier futures for ourselves, for our family and friends, for everyone.
Our vibrant and talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our goal. We continue to expand our workforce with amazing people who bring diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives at every level, and foster an environment where every athenista feels comfortable bringing their best selves to work.
Our size makes a difference, too: We are small enough that your individual contributions will stand out — but large enough to grow your career with our resources and established business stability.
Giving back is integral to our culture. Our athenaGives platform strives to support food security, expand access to high-quality healthcare for all, and support STEM education to develop providers and technologists who will provide access to high-quality healthcare for all in the future. As part of the evolution of athenahealth’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, we’ve selected nonprofit partners that align with our purpose and let us foster long-term partnerships for charitable giving, employee volunteerism, insight sharing, collaboration, and cross-team engagement.
What can we do for you?
Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.
In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons. And we provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.
We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility. While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time. With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation.
athenahealth is committed to a policy of equal employment opportunity—that’s why we recruit and hire applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, or any other factor prohibited by law. We’re happy to provide a reasonable accommodation, for those with a disability, to complete any part of the application process. If you are unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, please contact us at taoperations@athenahealth.com for assistance.
* Salary range is an estimate based on our AI, ML, Data Science Salary Index 💰
Tags: APIs Architecture AWS Azure BigQuery Data Analytics Data governance Data strategy Engineering ETL Finance FinTech GCP KPIs Machine Learning Nonprofit Pipelines Privacy Redshift Responsible AI Security Snowflake Spark STEM UX
Perks/benefits: Career development Health care Startup environment Team events
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