Director of Data

<p>We're hiring a Director of Data to lead First Connect's data function and build our data into a<br>real competitive moat. You'll report to the CPO, manage and grow our lean data team, and<br>partner across the leadership table. The role is roughly 70% Build &amp; Operate, 30% Lead &amp;<br>Influence in year one, shifting toward 50/50 as the team scales.</p> <p><strong>About First Connect</strong><br>First Connect is an insurance marketplace and aggregator. We connect thousands of<br>independent insurance agencies with a wide network of carriers, MGAs, and wholesalers. We<br>sit at a vantage point neither agents nor carriers have on their own, and turning that asymmetric<br>view into proprietary intelligence is one of the most important things we'll do over the next<br>several years.</p> <p><strong>What you'll do</strong><br>• Lead and grow our data team. Set direction, raise the bar, make their job better.<br>• Make self-service analytics real across First Connect, so every leader gets to their<br>answers without queuing behind the data team.<br>• Create a contracts-based partnership with the engineering teams producing source data.<br>• Build a core proprietary data asset that powers our internal and partner-facing<br>experiences and anchors real conversations with our carriers.<br>• Own the data infrastructure roadmap and the question of how we evolve our data<br>engineering investment over the next 12–24 months.<br>• Define how AI gets leveraged across our data stack and analytical workflows.<br>• Be the data partner the leadership team actually wants to call.</p> <p><strong>Who you are</strong><br>• You've led a data team inside a startup. You're a player-coach, comfortable<br>writing SQL one day, pushing back on C-level the next. Startup experience is essential.<br>• You operate via contracts with source teams, not central ownership of every dataset.<br>You've held source teams accountable for data quality.<br>• You're technically broad enough to make warehouse, ELT, and orchestration decisions.<br>Fluent in the modern data stack: a major BI tool (Sigma, Looker, Mode, Hex), dbt,<br>Postgres or Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift, ingestion tooling like Fivetran.<br>• You have a real point of view on AI in data work and can describe what you'd try first.<br>• You connect data investments to revenue, cost, retention, and competitive position. You<br>bring questions, not just answers.</p> <p><strong>Nice to have</strong><br>Insurance, Insurtech, or marketplace experience. Direct experience standing up a modern BI<br>platform.</p>