Director of Data
Owns the numbers the company trusts: the pipelines, the definitions, the warehouse and whether two dashboards can disagree.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Pebl lists this twice, in Palo Alto and Toronto, which says the data function is being built as a platform rather than as reporting. For a startup the sequence is: instrument the product, get one trustworthy source of truth, then hire. A data leader with no instrumented product has nothing to lead.
Education
Quantitative degree is common — statistics, CS, economics, engineering. For a leadership seat, the deciding factor is whether they have built a warehouse other teams actually used.
Experience
7+ years, with at least one data platform built from scratch and one metric definition fight they resolved. The second is the real skill: deciding what 'active customer' means and making it stick.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where the data is the regulated asset — health, finance, telecom, anything with cross-border personal data. Otherwise prioritise platform experience over industry.
What it pays, roughly
$106,080 median, Canada — for Mathematicians, statisticians, actuaries and data scientists, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $95,992 to $106,080 over 27,545 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters |
|---|---|---|
| CIPM / CIPP — privacy management and privacy law | International Association of Privacy Professionals | Directly relevant: this role usually becomes the de facto owner of data residency and retention. |
| Cloud data engineering certifications | Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft | Reasonable evidence of platform breadth. |
| CDMP — Certified Data Management Professional | DAMA International | Governance-oriented; appears in enterprise and public-sector contexts. |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. Instrument the product properly and keep the numbers in a spreadsheet the founder updates. The discipline of doing it by hand teaches you which numbers matter.
A data-literate engineer or analyst part time. One warehouse, a handful of defined metrics, and the board pack built from them rather than from memory.
A real owner. Pipelines, definitions, access controls, and the retention and residency policy you will be asked about in every enterprise security review.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Technology Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Chief Information Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Software Engineer
At seed the data function is one engineer who likes SQL, and that is correct. It stops working when every team wants numbers at once — the first sign is the same question answered three different ways in one week.
Keep separate from
Whoever reports the metrics should not also own the target they are measured against; keep the definition and the performance in different hands.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Starts by asking what decisions the data is for
- Insists on one definition per metric and writes it down
- Knows where the personal data is and who can read it
Red flags
- Proposes a warehouse before the product is instrumented
- Confuses dashboards with decisions
- No view on privacy or retention
What this role runs on
The software categories this seat lives in, each linked to the screen of who sells it — the incumbent, the challengers and what the lock-in is.
This role on a real job board
How a funded company words it. These are Pebl’s own open listings, quoted as published.
- Director of Data · Palo Alto, CA
- Director of Data · Toronto, Ontario
Source: Pebl careers, retrieved 2026-10-09.