About Rewards Network

For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs.

Our Culture

At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential.

Job Overview

The Head of Data is the senior leader accountable for Rewards Network's data strategy and the organization that delivers it, with end-to-end ownership of the Data Engineering and Data Science functions. Reporting to the CTO, this director-level role sets the vision for how data creates business value, builds the platform and team to realize it, and serves as the company's primary authority on data architecture, governance, and advanced analytics. The function is mid-migration to a modern data stack, and this leader will bring disciplined execution, architectural clarity, and consistency while scaling the organization for long-term growth.

The right person is a hands-on player-coach — equally comfortable setting strategy with the executive team and rolling up their sleeves on architecture, code, and models — who can build and scale a high-performing organization as we invest in data as a core pillar of our long-term competitive advantage. Early priorities include assessing the current in-flight build, making deliberate decisions about what to keep and what to replace, and establishing a multi-year data roadmap.

This is a hybrid position that requires in office presence 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago.

What you’ll bring to the table: (Responsibilities)

Define and own the data strategy and multi-year roadmap for Data Engineering and Data Science, aligning investments with company objectives in partnership with the CTO and executive team.
Establish and enforce architecture standards that ensure consistent designs that produce repeatable results.
Assess the current state of our data infrastructure — evaluate what needs refactoring, and what should be replaced — then execute on that plan with the team.
Lead the continued build-out of the modern data stack, including ELT pipelines, stream ingestion, transformation logic along with storage and compute — remaining hands-on in design and implementation while serving as the final technical authority on data platform decisions.
Hire and develop data talent, grow the team with experienced engineers and scientists and develop the existing team members through mentorship, code review, and technical leadership.
Own data governance, including the data model RFC process — reviewing proposed changes, enforcing boundary discipline, and ensuring no undocumented changes promote to canonical layers.
Own data pipeline monitoring and observability, ensuring production pipelines have appropriate alerting, data quality checks, and incident response processes so failures are caught early and resolved quickly.
Own the data function's budget, including headcount planning, platform and cloud spend, and vendor selection and management.
Serve as the data leader to the executive team and cross-functional stakeholders — reporting on progress, ROI, architectural decisions, and risks, and communicating tradeoffs clearly when business commitments are at risk.

Do you have the right mix of ingredients: (Requirements)

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)