Director, Platform Design & Intelligence

Company And Culture Complex is the definitive platform for global youth culture and music lifestyle, seamlessly integrating cutting-edge content, commerce and live experiences with unparalleled scale. Through innovative content, Complex tells stories of music, streetwear and style, sports, art and beyond. Its content engages in a dynamic conversation with the audience, reflecting and shaping the zeitgeist of convergence culture. A powerful media juggernaut paired with a curated marketplace, Complex is redefining the way fans interact with their favorite brands and artists and reshaping the future of digital culture and commerce.

Why We're Hiring We’re looking for a hands-on technical leader who loves systems design and is deeply curious about our audience. You’ll co-design and implement Complex’s platform, AI, and agentic infrastructure with both leaders and technical colleagues, building secure systems, proprietary tools, and better audience experiences.

You’ll exercise architectural decision-making authority with both leaders’ advice and consent, especially in continuous improvement, refinement, and optimization. We believe software is the new media: bring design thinking to our content and audience systems, building for durability and adaptability.

This position will be on-site in our New York, NY or Los Angeles, CA office.

What You'll Do Design a coherent platform

• Co-design the platform architecture and roadmap with both leaders and drive implementation with the team. Deepen our structured data lake and build reliable pipelines, warehouse models, and reusable services with SQL, Python, Snowflake, and AWS.
• Recommend what to build, buy, integrate, or retire. Implement agreed changes that remove unnecessary middleware, redundant licenses, and single-purpose tools.
• Develop and implement standards with engineering colleagues for data quality, testing, lineage, observability, and deployment. Improve performance, cloud costs, resilience, and recovery together.

Turn Audience Understanding Into Better Experiences

• Work with data scientists and data engineers to understand our audience and help develop and implement segmentation across teams.
• Design the signal capture that connects audience interactions to useful data. Make that data accessible and trustworthy for analytics, experimentation, content strategy, and product decisions.
• Partner with content, product, and engineering teams on proprietary tools and new audience interactions, with a clear place in the broader platform.

Put AI to work responsibly

• Build the data foundations for machine learning and generative AI, including training and inference pipelines, embeddings, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation where appropriate.
• Test new models and tools, evaluate results, and recommend priorities to both leaders. Implement agreed AI and agentic applications with the team, including evaluation and monitoring.
• Work closely with development, security, and applied AI colleagues to protect personally identifiable information and implement appropriate access controls. Make responsible design part of how the team builds and iterates.

Lead by building and teaching

• Stay hands-on in implementation and architectural refinement while mentoring engineers. Support hiring and development, and help establish practices for code quality, version control, CI/CD, and operational reliability.
• Help teams adopt the tools you build. Explain technical choices clearly, teach colleagues how systems work, and connect their use to content strategy and everyday decisions.
• Translate business needs into implementation priorities with both leaders and cross-functional partners. Clarify responsibilities and tradeoffs, coordinate delivery, and measure results against agreed outcomes.

Who You Are

• 8+ years in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related discipline, including 3+ years leading teams, technical initiatives, or data platform architecture.
• 5+ years each with SQL and Python, including complex data exploration, optimization, warehouse modeling, and production data or automation workflows.
• 3+ years each with Snowflake; AWS services such as S3, EC2, and Lambda; and Apache Airflow or comparable orchestration tools such as Dagster or Prefect.
• Experience building scalable production data platforms and pipelines, with strong data quality, testing, observability, and operational practices.
• Experience supporting machine learning or AI through data engineering or infrastructure; an understanding of statistical analysis, experimentation, and data science workflows; and working knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, vector search, RAG, and AI application architecture.
• Strong systems design and problem-solving skills. You can explain technical decisions to engineers and non-technical colleagues, work effectively with executives and cross-functional teams, and help others put new tools into practice.
• Curiosity about our audience, sound judgment around security and data use, and a willingness to keep learning as models and tools change.
• You must be willing to work on-site in our New York or Los Angeles office.

Additional Experience We Value

• Leading AI transformation or platform initiatives; building production LLM applications and AI-powered automation; and evaluating models, retrieval systems, and AI performance.
• Infrastructure as code such as Terraform; CI/CD, Docker, or Kubernetes; distributed processing such as Spark; and data governance, metadata, lineage, security, and privacy.
• Digital media, advertising, publishing, entertainment, or consumer technology; high-growth or resource-constrained teams; and evaluating third-party platforms and build-versus-buy decisions.

What We Offer

• Best in class health, dental, and vision insurance
• Healthcare FSA
• Dependent Care FSA
• Commuter Benefits FSA
• Short-term/long-term disability and life insurance
• Paid Parental leave
• 401k with 4% match
• Pet Insurance
• Legal and Identity Theft Plans
• Flexible PTO

$165,000 - $185,000 a year

The Pay Range for this position is listed. Actual pay will vary based on factors including, but not limited to experience and performance. The range listed is just one component of Complex's Total Rewards offerings for employees.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.

The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of the job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some incumbents assigned to the job to perform a different combination of duties.

Complex participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for visa sponsorship.