Director, Data, Programs & Strategic Initiatives

Ayar Labs is pioneering co-packaged optics (CPO) to move data at the speed of light.

About the role

This role involves setting the strategy and operating model for enterprise data capabilities, ensuring trusted data across the semiconductor product lifecycle. You will focus on turning data into reliable decisions, scalable platforms, and measurable business outcomes for our co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.

What you'll do

• Define and execute a multi-year data and analytics roadmap aligned to company priorities and semiconductor product milestones.
• Build, coach, and retain a high-performing team spanning data architecture, engineering, analytics, governance, and program leadership.
• Establish governance, stewardship, metadata, lineage, quality controls, and common definitions for semiconductor design, characterization, test, yield, manufacturing, supplier, and quality data.
• Oversee secure, reliable, and cost-effective data platforms, pipelines, models, and analytics products for operational reporting, engineering insight, and AI/ML use cases.
• Partner with engineering, product, operations, quality, IT, finance, and external manufacturing partners to translate business and technical problems into durable data solutions.
• Lead root-cause analysis and corrective action for data-quality disputes, gaps in genealogy and traceability, inconsistent metrics, and supplier-data failures.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, analytics, data architecture, or enterprise data management, including 5+ years leading technical teams and managers.
• A minimum of 5 years of direct, recent experience in the semiconductor industry, with understanding of the design-to-manufacturing lifecycle and domains such as silicon design, verification data, product and test engineering, characterization, yield, wafer fabrication, assembly and packaging, quality and reliability, or semiconductor supply-chain data.
• Demonstrated success hiring, coaching, organizing, and developing high-performing technical teams.
• Proven ownership of enterprise data strategy and modern data platforms, including data warehouses or lakehouses, ELT/ETL pipelines, data modeling, APIs, metadata, master/reference data, observability, and platform reliability.
• Experience establishing data ownership, stewardship, lineage, metric definitions, validation controls, access standards, and issue-resolution mechanisms.
• Strong working knowledge of SQL, Python or comparable data tooling, BI and visualization platforms, statistical analysis, and cloud data technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize investments, manage roadmaps and resources, reduce technical debt, track delivery and risk, and drive multiple complex initiatives.

Nice to have

• Experience with silicon photonics, advanced packaging, chiplets, foundry and OSAT data exchange, manufacturing/test/yield analytics, or engineering-focused AI/ML solutions.

Skills: enterprise data strategy, semiconductor product lifecycle, data governance, data platforms, AI/ML use cases, data quality

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