Built an AI or data platform? Find companies with that problem

If you're still looking for a Director or VP of Data role after having built a next-gen AI/Data platform from scratch, you’re looking in the wrong place.

Please feel free to share this with your Data leader friends and say “Varun called you a dingus” ;)

I've seen senior data leaders spend weeks trying to perfect their resume, rewriting the same platform story for every job and wondering why they're not getting enough interviews. Meanwhile, they're applying to companies that have absolutely no reason to care about what they've built.

Who actually needs your experience

Think about who actually needs that experience.

It's the technology company whose data infrastructure is starting to buckle under growth. It's the company moving aggressively into AI and realizing its existing architecture can't support what it's trying to build. The organizations that kept saying "we'll figure it out when we get there" have gotten there.

Those are the companies where a leader who has already built and scaled these systems becomes extremely valuable.

That's why I wouldn't start a job search by asking, "How do I package my experience?" and start applying to every company I see.

I'd start with, "Which companies have an urgent problem that my experience already solves?"

Specificity wins at Director and VP level

That changes the entire search.

Your experience building a production-grade AI platform from scratch becomes much more compelling when you're talking to a company that just announced a major AI initiative. Your experience scaling a modern data platform matters more when you're speaking with a company whose current architecture is struggling to keep up with growth. Your experience leading through that kind of transformation suddenly has a very obvious business case.

And this is where a lot of senior leaders get the job search backwards.

They spend most of their energy making themselves sound impressive instead of finding the companies where their experience is actually impressive.

At the Director and VP level, specificity wins.

You don't need every company to understand why you're exceptional. You need the right companies to look at your background and think, "We have exactly this problem."

Once you find those companies, your outreach, positioning, resume, and interview story all become much easier because you're connecting your experience to something they already care about.

The quality of your opportunities is heavily influenced by the quality of the problems you're positioning yourself to solve.

Find the companies with those problems first.

Then, tell them your story.

Been looking for a Tech leadership role for far too long? Book a call with us and we’ll do all the heavy lifting for you!