{"id":1126779,"url":"https://alion.io/job/protective-life-lead-dataops-mlops","title":"Lead DataOps / MLOps","company":{"id":4251,"name":"Protective Life","domain":"protective.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/protective","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Birmingham, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":124500,"max":170000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":170000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure DevOps","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"Delta Lake","optional":false},{"name":"FinOps","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Incident Management","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Azure AKS","optional":true},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"Great Expectations","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-15T21:11:09Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T08:38:30Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":31,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":31},"description":"Protective Life is transforming how it builds and operates software - moving to a product operating model organized around empowered, outcome-oriented teams - and is scaling its data and AI capabilities to serve customers and run the business better. Voyager is one of these product pods, spanning our Life, Annuities, and Employee Benefits lines.\nThe DataOps/MLOps Lead owns the platform and operating model that lets data and ML engineers ship reliably. You build the paved paths - CI/CD, orchestration, observability, environments, and governance automation - on our Databricks Lakehouse on Microsoft Azure, so that pipelines and models move from development to governed production quickly, safely, and repeatably.\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role: you set standards, automate the operational backbone, mentor engineers, and are accountable for the reliability, security, cost, and auditability of the pod's data and ML systems in a regulated insurance environment.\nKEY RESPONSIBILITIES\nOwn the DataOps/MLOps platform and operating model - the paved paths, automation, and tooling that data and ML engineers use to build and run pipelines and models reliably.\nLead CI/CD standards and pipelines in Azure DevOps (ADO) for data pipelines and ML models - build, test, and release automation, environment promotion, and repeatable, auditable deployments.\nStandardize orchestration on Dagster - reusable assets, scheduling, backfills, dependency management, and run observability across the pod's pipelines.\nOperationalize the ingestion and transformation stack - dlt (dltHub) and dbt - with automated testing, CI checks, and safe deployment of changes.\nBuild MLOps foundations with the ML engineering team - MLflow model registry, Databricks Model Serving, automated deployment, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining triggers.\nEstablish data and model observability - freshness, quality, lineage, latency, drift, and cost - with alerting and clear SLAs/SLOs.\nAdminister and govern the Databricks Lakehouse on Azure - workspace configuration, Unity Catalog governance, access controls, and policy automation.\nManage infrastructure as code and environments - reproducible dev/test/prod setups (e.g., Terraform), secrets management, and least-privilege access.\nOwn reliability and incident practices - on-call, runbooks, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement for data and ML services.\nDrive cost visibility and optimization (FinOps) across compute, storage, and model serving.\nAutomate governance and compliance controls - audit logging, model and pipeline inventories, approval workflows, and evidence collection for a regulated environment.\nProvide technical leadership and mentoring - coach engineers on operational excellence and set the platform standards the pod builds on.\nQUALIFICATIONS\nREQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS\n8+ years in data, ML, or platform engineering, or in SRE/DevOps, including several years operating production data and/or ML systems.\nDemonstrated technical leadership - setting standards, building paved paths and automation, and mentoring engineers (formal people management not required, but valued).\nStrong CI/CD expertise with Azure DevOps (ADO) - build/release pipelines, environment promotion, automated testing - and Git-based workflows.\nHands-on experience with orchestration (Dagster or equivalent) and the modern data stack - dlt (dltHub) ingestion and dbt modeling - on a Databricks lakehouse (Delta Lake).\nMLOps experience - MLflow model registry, model deployment/serving, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining automation.\nInfrastructure-as-code and cloud platform administration on Microsoft Azure (compute, storage, identity, networking basics); Terraform or equivalent.\nStrong Python and SQL for automation and tooling.\nExperience with observability/monitoring tooling and SRE practices - SLAs/SLOs, alerting, and incident management.\nDemonstrated rigor in security, access control, and secure, compliant handling of sensitive data.\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience.\nPREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS\nExperience in financial services or insurance platform work, and familiarity with model risk and regulatory audit expectations.\nDatabricks administration - Unity Catalog, cluster policies, and Mosaic AI - and familiarity with Azure Machine Learning.\nContainerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes; Azure AKS or Container Apps).\nExperience with data-quality / observability tooling (e.g., Great Expectations, Monte Carlo, or similar).\nExperience automating responsible-AI and model-governance controls.\nRelevant certification such as Databricks Certified Data Engineer/ML Engineer, Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer, or Azure Administrator.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4777,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Life Insurance & Annuities"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T22:05:16Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 3","filings_12m":3,"filings_prev_12m":1,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":142500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":2}],"liveness":{"score":56,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.741,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":31,"expected_fill_days":41,"reasons":["conf:0","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":170000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/protective-life-lead-dataops-mlops","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/protective-life-lead-dataops-mlops.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T09:13:50Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":12162,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4251},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4251"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fprotective-life-lead-dataops-mlops"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fprotective-life-lead-dataops-mlops"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fprotective-life-lead-dataops-mlops"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/protective-life-lead-dataops-mlops\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fprotective-life-lead-dataops-mlops"}]}