VP, Head of Data

Be essential at Cars Commerce

At Cars Commerce, we’re fanatical about simplifying everything about car buying and selling. We do right by our customers and consumers to better connect the industry with simplified and tierless technology to enhance, measure and drive local automotive retail. Whether through our No.1 most recognized marketplace, Cars.com, our industry-leading digital experience, Dealer Inspire, our trade and appraisal technology, AccuTrade, our reputation-based digital wholesale auction marketplace, Dealerclub, or our new Cars Commerce Media Network, Cars Commerce is essential for success in the automotive industry.

No one ever travels alone here: at its core, Cars Commerce is collaboration. In fact, it’s built into the very fabric of our shared values. We like to say we Rise Together – putting people at the center of what we do, from consumer to customer to community. Life at Cars Commerce makes it easy when we share the ethos to be Open to All, encouraging open-minded communication because we know diverse thinking yields better outcomes. But critical to our success is Caring to Challengeand Taking Ownership, fueling a competitive spirit in a respectful environment where we think about tomorrow but act today. At our foundation, we have integrity, Doing the Right Thing, even when it’s hard. It’s our shared commitment to these values that makes Cars Commerce a place where growth becomes not only possible, but downright unavoidable.

But don’t take our word for it. As a U.S. News & World Report Best Company to Work For in 2024, we're obsessive about the employee experience. We are among the top 20% being declared “Best” of our industry based on six critical factors that are important to employee wellbeing, like quality of pay, benefits, work life balance and more.

The Role
We are seeking a strategic and execution-oriented Head of Data to lead our enterprise data organization through its next stage of modernization and integration.

Reporting to the CTO and partnering closely with the CEO and Executive Leadership Team, the Head of Data will unify Data Engineering, Data Science, Revenue Analytics, and Business Intelligence into a cohesive, high-performing organization. This leader will drive architectural stabilization, governance clarity, and improved decision velocity across the company.

This is a transformation mandate grounded in pragmatic execution: stabilizing and rationalizing a fragmented data environment while delivering measurable business value along the way.

The Head of Data serves as the executive integrator across data pillars, aligning technical architecture with business priorities.

What You’ll Own

• Enterprise Data Strategy Governance and Risk

• Establish a trusted single source of truth for core enterprise metrics

• Define and execute a multi-year enterprise data roadmap spanning engineering, analytics, and science

• Align data capabilities to support marketplace growth, revenue expansion, and operational excellence

• Accountable for defining and enforcing enterprise-wide standards for data definitions, metric integrity, and stewardship across all business functions

• Own the identification and mitigation of enterprise data risks, including metric inconsistency, governance gaps, architectural fragility, and compliance exposure

• Establish clarity across departments on trusted performance indicators

Data Architectural Stabilization and Modernization

• Execute a multi-year modernization plan to democratize data consumption across the company with a high degree of confidence behind the metrics

• Deliver meaningful business utility within the first 6 months while driving long-term architectural integrity

• Rationalize a highly fragmented legacy data schema into scalable, domain-oriented models with clear sources of truth

• Establish instrumentation and data contracts that enforce trust, and support near real-time experimentation and optimization

• Establish engineering excellence standards that improve data reliability observability, and deployment rigor across the platform.

• Establish architectural foundations capable of supporting event-driven intelligence and AI readiness

Revenue Acceleration & Decision Velocity 

• Drive the evolution from static reporting to near real-time, decision-ready intelligence across marketplace performance, revenue operations, and executive KPIs

• Transition data from a reporting function to a revenue-driving capability by building trust around metrics and quality drivers that ensure accuracy

• Improve time-to-insight for revenue, dealership performance, and marketplace KPIs

• Enable reliable forecasting, pricing optimization, and experimentation frameworks

• Advise the CEO and Executive Leadership Team on data-related capital allocation, technology investments, and risk tradeoffs, ensuring disciplined ROI and long-term platform sustainability

• Organizational Leadership

• Enable a “culture of acceleration” across the Cars Commerce business that increases velocity and impact over time through democratized, trusted data

• Integrate and align multidisciplinary data functions under a unified operating model

• Build an “accelerating organization” that increases delivery velocity and technical rigor over time

• Serve as executive sponsor for data-related investment strategy, vendor partnerships, and cloud spend optimization

• Recruit, develop, and retain top-tier data leadership talent

• Data Science & Advanced Analytics

• Oversee applied data science initiatives including predictive modeling, optimization, and experimentation

• Ensure models integrate directly into product and revenue workflows

• Balance long-term AI readiness with practical business impact

Governance & Trust

• Establish pragmatic data governance and stewardship frameworks, working across the enterprise to ensure coordination with appropriate business, legal, information security and finance partners

• Ensure data accuracy, availability, security, and compliance

• Drive clarity on metric ownership and accountability across the enterprise

Who You Are
You are a seasoned data executive who operates as both strategist and practitioner. You have led multidisciplinary data organizations at scale and understand how to modernize legacy environments without disrupting business continuity. You treat data as a business function, not just a technical one.

You bring the mindset of an engineer, grounded in systems thinking, architectural integrity, and disciplined execution, even as you operate at the highest levels of enterprise leadership.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive data leadership experience, with 5+ years at the VP/SVP level leading multidisciplinary organizations across data engineering, analytics, and data science

• Demonstrated history influencing C-suite leaders and public company Boards to secure investment and deliver enterprise-scale data transformation initiatives

• Architectural & Data Foundations

• Strong foundational experience in database architecture, data engineering, or data platform design, with the ability to deeply understand data pipelines, schema design, and system-level data integrity

• Demonstrated ability to steer and evaluate enterprise data platform decisions across storage, compute, orchestration, and semantic modeling, prioritizing long-term architectural integrity over tool familiarity

• Proven track record guiding teams toward trusted, high-integrity data pipelines and “single source of truth” environments

Technical Leadership vs Tool Expertise

• Experience selecting and evolving data stack components based on business needs and scalability requirements, without being dependent on any single vendor ecosystem

• Comfort engaging in detailed architectural reviews while maintaining executive-level perspective

AI & Intelligent Systems Literacy

• Working understanding of the systems, data infrastructure, and experimentation frameworks required to enable scalable AI/ML initiatives

• Experience supporting rapid model experimentation and productionization environments, without needing to serve as a hands-on modeler

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience

• Advanced degree (e.g., MS, MBA) is a plus but not required

What Success Looks Like
First 6 Months

• Conduct rapid enterprise data assessment across architecture, governance, and operating model

• Deliver a prioritized modernization roadmap with clear sequencing and investment implications

• Establish clarity and accountability for core enterprise metrics

• Begin the process of transformation to increase trust in data by Implementing 1–2 high-impact automation or instrumentation initiatives around key business metrics

Year 1

• Northstar continues to be to Improve reliability and trust in enterprise performance metrics

• Institutionalize enterprise data usage by embedding trusted metrics into planning cycles, performance management, forecasting, and cross-functional decision making processes.

• Stabilize and rationalize foundational data architecture to reduce fragmentation and technical debt

• Core business dashboards operate on near real-time (at worst daily) refresh cycles with clearly defined metric ownership and trust

• Increased adoption of self-service analytics

• Eliminate manual reporting dependencies on key reports and increase workflow automation

• Advance data democratization across business functions

Year 2+

• Continue to strengthen the culture of acceleration in the company through easily accessible business insights (including lightweight dashboarding self-service interfaces and natural language data access).

• Modern, scalable data platform recognized as a competitive advantage

• Predictive intelligence embedded in product and revenue workflows

• High-performing data organization operating with clarity and velocity

Why This Role Matters
This is a rare opportunity to shape the enterprise data foundation of a scaled digital marketplace at an inflection point. This leader will help define how enterprise performance is measured, governed, and translated into strategic action.

This role sits at the intersection of technology, finance, product, and revenue. The Head of Data will influence how the company defines performance, allocates capital, manages risk, and leverages data as a strategic asset.

Success requires executive presence, the ability to influence and align senior leaders around enterprise standards, and the discipline to translate architectural complexity into strategic clarity without disrupting the business.

#LI-DNI

In the spirit of pay transparency, we are excited to share the base salary range for this position. In addition to base salary, some roles are eligible for our bonus and/or equity programs, depending on level and role. Regular full-time positions are eligible for our comprehensive benefits package. If you are hired at Cars Commerce, your final base salary compensation will be determined based on factors such as skills and/or experience. If the salary range is close to what you're seeking, then we encourage you to apply and learn more about the total compensation package for this position.

Salary Range

$252,800.00-328,650.00

Our Comprehensive Benefits Package includes:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Healthcare Plans

• New Hire Stipend for Home Office Set-Up

• Generous PTO

• Paid Holidays, Floating Holiday, Volunteer Day, Recharge Day

Learn more about our Benefits, Perks, & Culture on our LinkedIn Life Pages!

For US-based Positions: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States. Please note that we are unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.
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