VP of Data (Database & Clusters)📣 Job Ad

VP of Data (Database & Clusters) Opportunity

Talent Seed is seeking an experienced and strategic VP of Data (Database & Clusters) to lead its data organization. This full-time role, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, involves accountability for the databases and clusters that power the platform at scale, ensuring the reliability of the wider data platform, and overseeing BI services that provide customers with actionable insights into their businesses. The successful candidate will operate effectively at both strategic and deeply technical levels, holding direct management responsibility for the teams owning these areas.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the strategy, architecture, and lifecycle management of the production database estate, including MySQL, ClickHouse, Redis, and related systems. This encompasses capacity planning, performance tuning, high availability, and ensuring data integrity at scale.
• Lead the design, scaling, and operational excellence of database and analytics clusters, covering provisioning, replication, sharding, upgrades, and cost-efficient scaling to support significant data growth.
• Define and uphold reliability standards across the end-to-end data platform, including SLOs/SLIs, incident response, monitoring, observability, disaster recovery, and proactive risk mitigation.
• Drive the strategy and delivery of customer-facing BI services, ensuring users have timely, accurate, and actionable insights into their business and sales performance, while ensuring the underlying reporting infrastructure scales reliably.
• Build, mentor, and lead the managers and engineers responsible for these areas, establishing a clear organizational structure, career paths, and performance expectations across the data organization.
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Commercial leadership to align data infrastructure investments with the broader technology roadmap and business priorities.
• Manage the budget for the data organization, balancing performance, reliability, and cost across databases, clusters, infrastructure, and vendor tooling.
• Ensure data systems and practices comply with relevant regulatory and data-protection requirements, including SAMA and PDPL, embedding security and compliance into operations.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• A minimum of 10 years of experience in data or infrastructure engineering.
• At least 3 years in a leadership role managing teams responsible for databases, clusters, or large-scale data platforms.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in database architecture and operations, with MySQL and/or ClickHouse strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated experience operating highly available and reliable data platforms, including incident management, observability, and disaster recovery.
• Experience delivering BI or analytics products to external customers, with a strong understanding of data modeling and reporting pipelines at scale.
• Strong leadership and strategic thinking skills, with a proven ability to build, develop, and inspire high-performing engineering teams.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of articulating technical strategy to engineering teams, executive leadership, and wider business stakeholders.

Technical Expertise

• Proficiency in cluster management, replication, sharding, and performance optimization for high-throughput systems.

Preferred Skills and Background

• Experience operating ClickHouse or other columnar/analytical databases in production at scale.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, preferably AWS, and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
• Background within e-commerce, marketplaces, or customer-facing SaaS platforms.
• Strong understanding of data security, privacy, and compliance within Saudi Arabia/GCC, as well as the wider global regulatory environment.

Employment Details

This is a full-time position located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Salary details will be discussed during the interview process.