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Director Of Data Platform

AvonRisk is a national provider of risk management, claims administration, and managed care services for carriers, employers, and public entities across the United States. We unite respected regional leaders in workers' compensation, liability, managed care, and risk management — including Intercare, InterMed, George Hills, and AS&G Claims Administration — into a single national platform serving 32 states and nearly 700 professionals.

We're not a "big box" TPA. We invest in tools and workflows that reduce friction — not increase volume — and create real career paths for people who want to build, not babysit. We're a Microsoft-first, AI-enabled organization, and we're building the modern data foundation that turns operational data into decisions our clients trust.

Position Summary:

The Director of Data Platform owns AvonRisk's enterprise data platform — the Azure Fabric lakehouse, semantic models, governance framework, and customer-facing analytics that power every decision in our business. This is the most important technical hire in our 2026 transformation plan. You'll architect and build the platform during a focused 6-month surge with a contracted delivery team, then run and grow it as a permanent capability.

This is a senior individual-contributor leadership role, not a people-management role. Success is defined by platform impact, architectural quality, and business outcomes — not headcount. You will be hands-on in Fabric, Power BI, schemas, and security from day one.

This is the most important technical hire in our 2026 transformation plan. You'll architect and build the platform during a focused 6-month surge with a contracted delivery team, then run and evolve it as a permanent, enterprise capability. This role is for a builder-architect — someone who has done this work before, can make a delivery team productive immediately, and has the judgment to make decisions that compound over years. Power BI semantic modeling depth matters as much as pipeline engineering. Regulated data experience (insurance, healthcare, financial services) is a strong plus.

The 6-month build is the foundation. The real impact comes from what the platform enables next — transformational analytics, predictive models, and client-facing intelligence that create competitive advantage for our clients and operating leverage for AvonRisk. We are hiring someone who can build the foundation and be a thought partner on what comes next.

What You'll Do:

What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days:

• A clear, defensible Fabric architecture with environments, security, and semantic strategy defined
• A surge team that is unblocked, productive, and shipping on a predictable cadence
• At least one real client dataset flowing end-to-end into a governed semantic model
• Early trust from BI, product, and operations that this platform will make their work easier, not harder

Build the Platform (Months 1–6):

• Own the Azure Fabric architecture end-to-end: workspace topology, OneLake / Iceberg storage strategy, dev/test/prod separation, capacity sizing, governance.
• Lead a 4-person surge team (Data Architect, two Data Engineers, Business Analyst) through a 6-month build. Set the bar; remove blockers; make them productive immediately.
• Define the Bronze? Silver? Semantic layered architecture, with a Gold semantic schema expressed in AvonRisk business terms (not source-system terms) so reports, dashboards, and AI models survive future claims-platform migrations.
• Drive the Fabric Mirroring validation for our claims system (CE/iVOS) and design the ADF fallback where Mirroring isn't viable.
• Architect multi-tenant PHI security: client-segregated PHI workspace + masked cross-tenant analytics layer, with RLS and Fabric secure data sharing for client portal access.
• Stand up the customer-facing analytics portal (Power BI Embedded or Fabric-native) with a 10+ client pilot live by end of Month 6.
• Establish data catalog, lineage, DQ, and governance using Microsoft Purview and Fabric-native tools.

Run and Grow the Platform (Month 7+):

• Operate the platform as a permanent capability — uptime, performance, capacity, cost.
• Onboard additional source systems as AvonRisk grows through acquisition and new programs.
• Build the AI/ML feature foundation that underpins our agent roadmap — Fraud, Provider Intelligence, Recovery, Safety & Loss Control.
• Serve as the strategic technical voice for the transformational analytics built on top of this platform — cross-client benchmarking, predictive severity, provider performance, client risk recommendations, litigation propensity, subrogation identification at scale. You won't deliver every one of these yourself; you'll be the thought leader on what's possible, what's worth doing, and what the business and our clients should expect from data we own.
• Partner closely with product builders, claims operations, and client-facing teams to keep the semantic model honest about what the business actually needs.

Enable the BI Team:

• The BI team is a separate organization focused on business reporting today. Your job is not to absorb them — it's to give them a platform that makes their work easier and unlocks their next chapter:
• In the near term, lift the BI team off hand-built SQL and SSRS by giving them clean, governed semantic models they can self-serve against.
• Over time, partner with BI leadership as the team graduates from operational reporting into the higher-value, more technical work the platform unlocks: data insights, advanced analytics, AI/ML on top of the lakehouse, and data science. Your platform is the foundation that makes that future possible.
• Coach on dimensional modeling, semantic design, and Power BI best practices where it helps — without owning their team or their roadmap.

Lead Without a Hierarchy:

• Write the documentation and runbooks that let this platform survive without you.
• Be the technical voice in roadmap conversations with the CPTO, BI leadership, and operations leaders.
• Set the standard for how data work gets done at AvonRisk — governed, reproducible, AI-assisted, and built to last.

Requirements:

What You Bring:

Required:

• 7+ years of hands-on data platform work, including 3+ years on a modern cloud lakehouse or warehouse (Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or Synapse).
• Production Azure Fabric experience preferred — alternatively, deep Azure data experience (Synapse, ADF, ADLS Gen 2, Power BI Premium) and a credible plan to come up to speed on Fabric in week one.
• Power BI semantic modeling at depth — DAX, dataset design, Direct Lake mode, Row-Level Security. You can architect a semantic model, not just consume one.
• Modern data engineering posture: DBT (or equivalent — SQLMesh, Coalesce) for transformation engineering · data testing frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations) · ADF, Fabric Pipelines, or equivalent orchestration · CI/CD for data · infrastructure as code (Bicep / Terraform) · Git-based workflows for analytics code. We are explicitly not hiring "I know SQL and have been around data for 25 years" — we're hiring modern analytics engineering.
• Dimensional modeling judgment — when to denormalize, when to conform, when to wait. Star schemas and slowly-changing dimensions in your sleep.
• Multi-tenant + PHI/PII data architecture experience. RLS, masking, lineage, audit. You've done this for real, not just read about it.
• Strategic data product thinking. You can articulate what business problems data uniquely solves — and which it doesn't. You've moved past "build a warehouse" into "use data to change how the business operates." You can be a thought partner on AvonRisk's analytics roadmap, not just the platform underneath it.
• Track record leading or quarterbacking contracted delivery teams — including offshore — through fixed-window engagements.
• Excellent written communication. You can produce a design document a CPTO or auditor can read.

Strongly Preferred:

• Insurance, healthcare, financial-services, or regulated-data analytics product background — HIPAA, SOC 2, state regulatory reporting; experience shipping analytics products that customers or regulators actually consumed.
• Experience migrating off legacy SSRS / stored-proc reporting estates onto modern semantic models.
• Spark / Py