IT DataOps Manager

IT DataOps Manager – £80,000-£90,000 – Hybrid working (2-3 days per week in the office – London)

The job in a nutshell

• In this role, your team will ensure our Data platforms are operated effectively, efficiently, securely, and with performance, security, and availability at the heart of all you do. You and your team will work collaboratively with our Data Delivery team to ensure the operational viability of anything we design and build as a team.
• You will own and be accountable for our data infrastructure (Azure) and associated applications, leading an agile team of support engineers using DevOps and DataOps principles.
• The client is investing heavily in data transformation and so you’ll need to be a highly motivated self-starter who can contribute towards shaping and delivering enterprise data infrastructures, within a backdrop of a number of inflight project initiatives.
• You will adopt and implement a best practice approach to process, technology, problem management and tooling. You will be working closely with internal SMEs, 3rd party suppliers and business stakeholders, to provide a stable and secure platform from which, data delivery teams, can build and release new data solutions for you, which enables a self-serve first approach to BI and reporting.
• This is a hands-on operational management role, with many day to day activities, where you will help shape and build a function, and manage a team. You must have experience of cloud based infrastructure management, data orchestration and BI tools, and an understanding of DevOps and DataOps best practice.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead the operations team, maintain the data platform (infrastructure applications and tooling) in conjunction with the data delivery team, ensuring that we have a secure and scalable foundation on which to base our data platform.
• Ensuring all platform components and data flows are proactively monitored, maintained and supported on a 24x7x365 basis according to industry/vendor best practice and in accordance with agreed SLAs and KPIs.
• Owning and leading lifecycle management activities across all platform components (production and non-production), ensuring maintenance and upgrade activities are proactively planned, executed and communicated.
• Proactively seeking and implementing improvements in the areas of reliability, availability, performance, integrity, capacity, compliance, security, supportability and cost, leading migration and modernisation activities.
• Driving and championing automation into every part of our cloud data infrastructure adopting a service first culture, using CI/CD and infrastructure as code, where possible.
• Implementing DevOps practices into the provisioning of infrastructure and applications across multiple engineering teams.
• Applying DataOps principles, standards and technologies to reduce time to data/insight whilst maintaining data quality and integrity, and respecting compliance, privacy and security.
• Working closely with data delivery teams to influence them to ensure operational requirements are appropriately understood and delivered within the design authority workshops.
• Owning the release processes, ensuring all data releases are reviewed and approved prior to deployment and that appropriate operational and business acceptance criteria have been met.
• Contributing to and assuring data application roadmaps and solution designs, ensuring all solutions provide the required level of utility and warranty.
• Ensuring (in conjunction with the Information Security and Risk & Compliance teams) that all platform components are managed to the appropriate level of risk.
• Ensuring effective DR/BCP plans exist to deliver the required RPOs and RTOs for all data platform components, including regular testing.
• Working closely with other IT Operations and IT Delivery teams to ensure there is a coordinated approach to data platform management and continuous improvement.
• Owning and developing third party supplier relationships, including performance management, financial management, and contract management.
• Providing periodic reporting and management information on operational SLAs, KPIs, improvement initiatives and budgets.

What we’ll expect from you

• Experience as a hands-on Cloud Infrastructure, DataOps, or DevOps manager.
• Confident building and leading a high performing team to deliver measurable success, through periods of significant transformation.
• Experience of operating within a data environment, delivering infrastructure, applications and tools into engineering teams at an operational level.
• Solid understanding and practical experience of Azure data services, including SQL Paas/Iaas, Azure Data Lake, Data Factory and Data Warehouse tools.
• A working understanding of data orchestration tools (ADF, Talend or similar) and BI tools (Power BI and Qlik).
• Genuine interest in data and data management, with a level of commercial industry awareness and understanding of best practice (ITIL, Agile, DevOps, DataOps)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, able to effectively communicate with and influence both internal and external stakeholders, up to and including C-Suite.
• Must have high levels of energy and personal impact, driven to deliver at pace and challenge the norm.
• Strong vendor management skills having held roles where services are managed and supported through a multi-vendor sourcing model.