Sr. Data Platform Operations Lead

POSITION PURPOSE:

CIM Group is modernizing its enterprise data platform, migrating from a legacy Microsoft SQL Server estate to a Databricks Lakehouse architecture. The Data Platform Operations Lead is the operational owner of that platform - accountable for keeping it reliable, performant, and cost-disciplined for internal stakeholders and investors.

This is a hands-on role with a leadership edge. The successful candidate personally owns production support and day-to-day platform operations, owns the firm’s DevOps tooling and CI/CD practice for data, and partners closely with Infrastructure and Data Engineering on the foundation and security layers those teams own. The role requires strong technical judgment and the ability to drive outcomes across a matrixed organization, make decisive operational calls, and act as a trusted delegate of the Head of Enterprise Data Management.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Production Support & Operational Reliability (Primary)

• Own end-to-end incident and problem management for the data platform: detection, triage, resolution, and root-cause analysis across pipelines, jobs, and the downstream consumers.
• Own job-failure remediation and recovery, restoring critical data flows within targets calibrated to the close and investor-reporting calendars.
• Define and operate data freshness and data-quality monitoring, alerting, and SLA tracking against reporting deadlines.
• Author and maintain runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call procedures; lead post-incident reviews and drive corrective actions to closure.
• Carry on-call responsibility on a severity-based basis, with heightened coverage around quarter-end close and investor-reporting cycles.

Databricks Platform Administration & Operations

• Own day-to-day operations of the Azure Databricks Lakehouse: cluster policies, instance pools, SQL warehouse sizing, serverless configuration, and runtime currency.
• Maintain workflow and Delta Live Tables pipeline reliability and performance at the platform level.
• Note: Unity Catalog data-object privilege administration is owned by Data Stewardship and Data Engineering; this role partners on the operational impact but does not own catalog grants.

FinOps & Cost Management

• Own end-to-end FinOps for the data platform: resource tagging, budget policies, and consumption monitoring via Databricks system tables, and keeping spend predictable and defensible.
• Deliver cost transparency and chargeback/showback by business line, giving Fund Accounting, Portfolio Oversight, and other consumers visibility into what they drive.
• Right-size compute (cluster policies, instance pools, SQL warehouse and serverless configuration) and drive continuous optimization of the platform's cost-to-serve.
• Forecast platform spend, flag variances early, and partner with Finance and the Head of Enterprise Data Management on the platform budget.

DevOps & CI/CD Tooling

• Administer the DevOps toolchain for data - GitHub organization, repositories and access, CI runners, and pipeline secrets - operating with the advanced / administrator privileges these systems require.
• Own and deploy CI/CD for data assets - GitHub Actions pipelines and Databricks Asset Bundle-based deployment of notebooks, jobs, DLT pipelines, and platform objects across dev, test, and production.
• Build and administer the Infrastructure-as-Code toolchain (Terraform with the Databricks provider, and Azure IaC for surrounding resources), and own the environment-promotion and release-management model.
• Establish the observability strategy - monitoring, logging, alerting, and data-quality gates - and hold the practice to it.
• Set the deployment standards and review gates the wider Data Engineering team builds within, and make decisive calls on what gets promoted to production.

Infrastructure & Platform Security Partnership

• Own Databricks account and workspace administration and partners with Infrastructure team for provisioning, the account console, identity federation (SCIM and SSO via Entra ID), and group and entitlement management.
• Partner with Infrastructure on platform security - Private Link and network connectivity, secret scopes, token governance, and exfiltration controls.
• Maintain deep conceptual command of these areas to translate operational needs into infrastructure requirements and to resolve platform issues that cross the operations / infrastructure boundary.

Leadership & Matrixed Influence

• Drive outcomes across a matrixed organization - Infrastructure, Data Engineering, Fund Accounting, and Portfolio Oversight - setting priorities and securing alignment without sole positional authority.
• Make decisive operational and platform decisions.
• Coordinate platform change with the firm’s data-governance and change-management processes rather than operating in parallel.

EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS: (including certification, licenses, etc.)

Required:

• 8-12 years in data platform operations, DataOps, or a closely related discipline, with demonstrated hands-on production-support ownership.
• Strong, current Databricks platform operations experience - compute, cost and FinOps governance, SQL warehouses, workflows/DLT, and runtime management on Azure.
• Hands-on experience administering and deploying CI/CD and DevOps tooling (e.g., GitHub / GitHub Actions), Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), and observability tooling for a data platform.
• A proven track record of partnering with an infrastructure / cloud team on identity, networking, and platform security.
• Evidence of driving cross-functional outcomes in a matrixed environment and exercising sound, decisive judgment under operational pressure.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred:

• Experience in financial services, alternative investments, or real estate / infrastructure asset management, with familiarity with close cycles and investor-reporting calendars.
• Databricks Academy Accreditation - Platform Administrator, and/or Databricks Certified Data Engineer (Associate or Professional).
• Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400).
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.
• Experience operating BI / reporting platforms such as Domo as downstream consumers of a data platform.

ABOUT YOU:

The ideal candidate is a hands-on operator who takes personal ownership of platform reliability and stays calm and decisive under pressure - especially around quarter-end close and investor-reporting cycles. They are fluent in modern data platform operations on Databricks, disciplined about cost (FinOps), and as comfortable administering DevOps tooling and Infrastructure-as-Code as they are running an incident to root cause. They build durable partnerships with Infrastructure and Data Engineering and drive outcomes across a matrixed organization without relying on positional authority.

Key Competencies:

• Entrepreneurial Mindset: Comfortable building from scratch in environments without mature processes; thrives with ambiguity and takes initiative.
• Business Partnership: Translates complex platform and operational trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders across Fund Accounting, Portfolio Oversight, and Investor Relations.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Proven track record of building relationships and influence without authority across technical and business functions.
• Business Value Orientation: Focuses on ROI and business outcomes, not just technical elegance; can prioritize initiatives based on business impact.
• Operational Rigor: Strong instincts for reliability, security, and controls - runbooks, monitoring, SLAs, and disciplined incident and change management.
• Continuous Learner: Stays current with the evolving Databricks, DevOps, and FinOps landscape; actively evaluates new tooling and approaches.