Data Operations Manager

Position Summary

The Data Operations Manager is responsible for ensuring the stability, reliability, and governance of Builders’ enterprise data platform, enabling trusted, high-quality data and supporting the organization’s evolving business needs.

Responsibilities

• Lead the production support team; create clear direction, accountability, SLAs, on-call rotations, and escalation procedures.

• Serve as the senior escalation point for critical production data incidents; lead triage, root cause analysis, and resolution across engineering, infrastructure, and vendor teams.

• Develop and maintain monitoring and alerting processes across all data pipelines and platform services to enable proactive identification and resolution of issues.

• Provide after-hours support for critical incidents and release escalations in collaboration with on-call engineers.

• Recruit, hire, train, mentor, and evaluate production support staff and data platform engineers; build teams aligned with the organization’s values and the demands of the modernization roadmap.

• Assess current team capabilities, close skill gaps through coaching and development, and mature the production support function in step with the broader platform evolution.

• Lead daily stand-up meetings, fostering communication and alignment across the team.

• Maintain and prioritize a backlog of production issues, platform enhancements, and migration workstreams; collaborate with leadership and colleagues to align delivery with business priorities.

• Contribute to solution architecture decisions in partnership with leadership colleagues representing platform stability, governance, and operational sustainability.

• Stay current on DataOps practices, cloud platform capabilities, and relevant industry regulations through ongoing professional development.

• Administer SQL Server in a production enterprise environment, including instance configuration, maintenance plans, and ongoing performance tuning.

• Maintain and refactor complex T-SQL stored procedures and SSIS-based ETL pipelines, ensuring performance, accuracy, and long-term supportability.

• Oversee integrations between financial systems and insurance platforms (e.g., Guidewire, Great Plains), ensuring the accuracy, availability, and timeliness of financial close processes.

• Maintain a comprehensive financial reporting calendar and ensure data delivery commitments are consistently met.

• Administer and operate the Databricks Data Lakehouse as the target platform, ensuring reliability, performance, security, and availability for all downstream analytics and reporting consumers.

• Manage Unity Catalog, workspace configuration, cluster policies, access controls, and cost governance within the Databricks environment.

• Maintain and optimize medallion-layer pipelines, Delta tables, and data quality frameworks as the platform assumes production workloads from the SQL Server environment.

• Establish and enforce platform standards, deployment patterns, and operational runbooks that support a sustainable, well-governed Databricks environment.

• Monitor platform health, usage, and performance; identify and resolve bottlenecks proactively to maintain SLAs for downstream consumers.

• Lead the migration of the organization’s SQL Server data warehouse to a Databricks Data Lakehouse, serving as the program’s primary technical owner and delivery lead.

• Design and implement a medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold) in Databricks, establishing ingestion, transformation, quality, and consumption patterns that will govern the target platform long-term.

• Evaluate and integrate supporting Azure data services — including Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse, and Azure Purview — as components of the broader lakehouse ecosystem.

• Establish DataOps practices including CI/CD for data pipelines, automated data quality testing, and version-controlled deployment standards that apply across both platforms during and after the transition.

• Partner with colleagues to ensure the data platform reliably supports self-service analytics, standardized definitions, and business-unit reporting needs throughout and beyond the migration.

• Drive improvements in data quality, pipeline efficiency, and platform performance that enhance the speed and accuracy of business decision-making.

• Implement and operate enterprise data governance capabilities including data catalog, lineage tracking, domain ownership, and metadata standards across both SQL Server and Databricks environments, leveraging platforms such as Azure Purview.

• Design and maintain automated controls for data privacy, access management (RBAC), and retention policies that span the full platform lifecycle — from legacy warehouse to cloud-native lakehouse.

• Ensure ongoing alignment with applicable regulatory frameworks including SOX, GDPR, and NAIC requirements relevant to commercial property and casualty insurance.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, a math-related discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Five or more years of hands-on SQL Server administration of large databases in a high-availability, production enterprise environment, including advanced proficiency in T-SQL, stored procedure development and refactoring, query performance tuning, and index management
• Two or more years of experience in a senior or lead technical role that included direct guidance, mentorship, or management of engineers, including experience leading or participating in a production support function; experience owning database availability and recovery, including backup and restore operations, high-availability configuration, and disaster recovery planning across multiple environments
• Knowledge of SQL Server security best practices, including permission models, role management, auditing, and compliance controls in a regulated environment
• Knowledge of Databricks platform administration — including familiarity with Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, medallion architecture, and cloud-native ETL/ELT patterns
• Skills in production support operations including SLA management, incident response, on-call coordination, and root cause analysis for enterprise data systems
• Skills in relational and dimensional database principles and data warehousing practices
• Skills in estimation, prioritization, organization, and time management with attention to detail; ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams accurately
• Skills in verbal and written communications; able to present complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences while maintaining confidentiality
• Skills in interpersonal interactions with the ability to collaborate across all organizational levels and with external stakeholders and vendors
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft Windows Server platform, and other function-specific applications