Vice President – Data Platforms

Role Overview

Vice President – Data Platforms at Aldar Properties. The role is based within the Group and serves Aldar and its subsidiaries.

Role Purpose

Own the data backbone of the Group: the platforms through which data is ingested, stored, modeled, governed and made available for analytics, Artificial Intelligence and operational use across Aldar and its subsidiaries. Establish end-to-end accountability from data platform engineering to operations, building AI-ready foundations and a self-service model that lets Group Digital and the business consume trusted data at speed, without the data platform becoming a bottleneck. Serve Group Digital's Data & AI teams with data and self-service capabilities; analytics and data science ownership remains with Group Digital.

Key Responsibilities

Data Platform Strategy & Architecture

• Define and evolve the Group data platform architecture: ingestion, storage, modeling, processing and serving layers.
• Design for reuse, scalability, security-by-design and cost efficiency across the Group and subsidiaries.
• Build AI-ready foundations: pipelines, data products and platform capabilities that support advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence use cases.

Data Engineering & Ingestion

• Own data ingestion from enterprise and subsidiary source systems into the Group data platform, with reliable, monitored pipelines.
• Set engineering standards for data pipelines, data products and platform automation.
• Ensure database management and storage planning support performance and growth.

Platform Data Governance & Quality

• Implement platform-level data governance: data principles, cataloguing, lineage, quality monitoring and access controls.
• Safeguard master data alignment and data reliability for downstream consumers.
• Partner with Information Security on data protection controls across the platform.

Serving Group Digital & Self-Service

• Serve Group Digital's Data & AI teams with data and self-service capabilities, with clear interfaces and service commitments.
• Enable governed self-service for business and subsidiary teams, balancing autonomy with control.
• Provide centralized observability of data flows supporting digital products.

Operations & Reliability

• Ensure availability, performance and cost discipline of the data platform in production.
• Establish monitoring, incident management and capacity planning for data services.
• Drive FinOps discipline on data platform and storage spend.

Leadership & Talent Development

• Build and lead the Data Platforms team, including data platform and database management capabilities.
• Develop data engineering depth and support Emiratization objectives.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field is required.
• Master's degree is preferable.
• Minimum of 10–12+ years in data platform engineering or data architecture leadership within large, complex organizations.
• Minimum of 2+ years of managerial experience in a related field.
• Enterprise data platforms at group or multi-entity scale, including cloud data stacks.
• Data engineering practices, data governance tooling and self-service enablement.
• Building AI-ready data foundations (pipelines, MLOps-adjacent capabilities) is an advantage.

Skills & Competencies

• Engineering leader with architectural depth; credible with both engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Service mindset toward Group Digital and the business: the platform exists to be consumed.
• Rigorous on data reliability, governance and cost discipline.
• Comfortable operating at the boundary between technology platforms and digital product teams.