Principal Consultant – Data Lead

Role Overview

The Principal Consultant – Data Lead serves as the senior data leader for Higher Education transformation engagements, with a strong requirement for experience with Ascend CRM and Advancement data.

This role combines Engagement Leadership, hands-on SQL and data development, Data Strategy, Data Governance, and Integration Advisory. The individual must be comfortable leading executive and client conversations while also working directly with technical teams to analyze data, develop SQL, define integration patterns, and drive successful delivery.

Key Responsibilities

Engagement & Client Leadership

• Serve as the primary data and technical point of contact for client leadership and key stakeholders.
• Build trusted client relationships and ensure strong satisfaction, retention, and value realization.
• Provide oversight across project scope, schedule, budget, risks, quality, and deliverables.
• Lead and mentor consultants, business analysts, developers, and other project team members.
• Facilitate executive and working-team discussions, resolve issues proactively, and align delivery with client objectives.
• Identify risks, dependencies, and decisions requiring client or project leadership attention.
• Translate technical delivery activities into clear business outcomes and executive-level communication.

Higher Education / Ascend CRM Leadership

• Bring strong knowledge of Higher Education Advancement data and CRM processes, preferably with direct Ascend CRM implementation or migration experience.
• Understand constituent, household, organization, gift, campaign, fund/designation, prospect, portfolio, and engagement data.
• Advise clients on data migration, conversion, reconciliation, integration, and data quality strategies associated with Ascend implementations.
• Partner with functional Advancement teams to translate business requirements into data and technical solutions.
• Understand the relationships between Advancement CRM, finance, identity, marketing, analytics, and other institutional systems.

SQL Development & Data Engineering

The Data Lead must remain technically hands-on and capable of directly supporting development when needed.

• Write and troubleshoot complex SQL queries.
• Analyze large datasets to identify data quality, transformation, mapping, and reconciliation issues.
• Support source-to-target mapping and migration development.
• Perform data profiling and assist with cleansing, normalization, deduplication, and transformation rules.
• Support developers during complex migration and integration troubleshooting.

Data Strategy

• Serve as a bridge between executive leadership, business stakeholders, functional teams, and technical engineering/analytics teams.
• Translate organizational goals and business requirements into actionable data strategies and technical requirements.
• Develop current-state and future-state data architectures and roadmaps.
• Advise clients on data platforms, integration patterns, analytics architecture, master data, and enterprise data management.
• Help clients define how operational, CRM, financial, engagement, and analytical data should work together across the organization.

Data Governance & Data Quality

• Establish and advise on enterprise data governance frameworks.
• Define data ownership, stewardship, accountability, and decision-making structures.
• Develop data standards, business definitions, and data quality controls.
• Establish processes for:
  • Data quality monitoring
  • Data remediation
  • Data ownership
  • Metadata and definitions
  • Data lifecycle management
  • Governance escalation and decision making
• Partner with business and technical stakeholders to embed governance into operational processes rather than treating governance as a standalone initiative.

Integration Advisory

• Strategy & Planning: Design integration architectures and blueprints, map end-to-end data flows, define integration patterns, and establish technical requirements across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with business stakeholders, IT teams, application owners, architects, and external vendors to align integration requirements, priorities, dependencies, and business outcomes.
• Execution & Delivery Oversight: Provide technical leadership across design, development, testing, deployment, and stabilization while managing risks, dependencies, timelines, and overall solution quality.
• Support & Troubleshooting: Analyze integration failures, logs, data issues, and system errors; coordinate root-cause analysis and resolution of production incidents and interface issues.
• Integration Advisory: Serve as a subject matter expert on integration architecture, patterns, platforms, and best practices, recommending improvements that increase scalability, reliability, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
• Standards & Governance: Establish reusable integration standards, naming conventions, error-handling approaches, monitoring practices, security requirements, and documentation expectations.
• Platform Guidance: Advise on the appropriate use of APIs, batch/file processing, ETL/ELT, event-driven architecture, real-time and near-real-time integrations, and middleware/iPaaS platforms.
• Provide advisory guidance across platforms such as MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica, Workato, Azure, AWS, and similar enterprise integration technologies.

Required Qualifications

• Significant consulting experience leading complex enterprise data initiatives.
• Experience within Higher Education, preferably Advancement, fundraising, alumni relations, or constituent data.
• Experience with Ascend CRM strongly preferred.
• Strong hands-on SQL development capabilities.
• Experience with data migration, source-to-target mapping, transformation, data quality, integration, and reconciliation.
• Demonstrated ability to lead client engagements and communicate effectively with executive stakeholders.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical and functional teams.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data architecture, data governance, integration architecture, and data management principles.
• Experience designing or advising on APIs, ETL/ELT, batch, real-time, and event-driven integration patterns.
• Ability to move between executive strategy discussions and detailed technical problem solving.
• Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is not purely a project manager, architect, or developer. This person can operate across all three levels:

• Executive: Build trust, communicate strategy, manage risk, and advise leadership.
• Delivery: Own outcomes, coordinate teams, manage scope and priorities, and drive decisions.
• Technical: Get into the data, write SQL, review mappings, design integration approaches, troubleshoot interfaces, and help solve difficult migration and data-quality problems.

The successful candidate should be viewed by the client as the overall Data Lead and trusted advisor for the engagement, while remaining technical enough to work directly alongside developers, architects, analysts, integration teams, and client data teams.

Additional Requirements:

• Demonstrated ability to build trusted advisor relationships with clients
• Experience supporting sales and business development
• Position requires flexibility to travel periodically based on business and client needs