Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience through technology, data, analytics, and AI solutions. The Director, ZDC Operations will own the reliability, monitoring, and operational quality of production data pipelines across the Snowflake-based Zelis Data Cloud, while building a DataOps/Data Reliability Engineering practice and leading distributed support operations.
Responsibilities
- **Operating model & Center of Excellence** — establish a data operations CoE with a distributed onshore/offshore, tiered (L1/L2/L3) support structure; drive efficiencies and economies of scale, reduce duplication of tooling and process, and enable automation (including RPA) across the data lifecycle
- **Production pipeline operations & SLA management** — own end-to-end run-state health for all ZDC data pipelines; define, measure, and hold to data SLAs/SLOs and reliability KPIs (freshness SLO attainment, MTTD, MTTR, change-failure rate)
- **Orchestration & run-time reliability** — job orchestration, scheduling, dependency management, and recovery; drive down failed-run rates and mean-time-to-recovery
- **Operational data quality & incident triage** — operational data-quality checks and testing frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations / Soda), data contracts and schema-change management, freshness/latency monitoring, anomaly detection, and a disciplined incident-triage and root-cause process
- **Build & lead the Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) function** — hire, mentor, and set standards for a DRE practice that applies SRE discipline (error budgets, runbooks, blameless postmortems) to data
- **Run-state support, on-call & DBA coordination** — own the on-call rotation, escalation, and incident-management tooling (PagerDuty / Jira); coordinate Snowflake / DBA support for run-state issues
- **GOC enablement** — build the runbooks, monitoring dashboards, alerting, and escalation paths that enable the Global Operations Center (GOC) to take on L1 support for ZDC around the clock
- **Data observability** — deploy and operate the team's data-observability tooling for pipeline lineage, freshness, and incident detection
- **Snowflake administration leadership** — lead the Snowflake administration function, ensuring platform administration, RBAC, and PHI/DLP guardrails are maintained day-to-day; partner with the Data Platforms & Tooling team on standards and reference architecture
- **Operational metrics, process & transparency** — provide visibility into operational health through operational dashboards and KPIs; establish process and documentation templates and drive adherence; track and report work through Jira / Confluence
- **Cross-team partnership** — partner with Data Platforms & Tooling on CI/CD and environment stability, and with Data Enablement on clean pipeline handoffs from build to run
- **Cost, capacity & compliance stewardship** — steward Snowflake compute / warehouse consumption from an operational-reliability lens; ensure adherence to Zelis privacy and data-handling standards
- **Aligning performance for success** — coach and develop the team; set goals and work plans and give timely feedback
- **Strategic thinking** — formulate operational strategy aligned to business priorities; anticipate risks and opportunities with a long-term view
- **Delivers results** — set high goals, convey a sense of urgency, and drive issues to closure
- **Decision making** — identify issues, gather and interpret information, weigh options, and commit to action
- **Planning & organizing** — establish courses of action for self and others; prioritize and marshal resources in a fast-changing environment
- **Facilitating & supporting change** — champion innovative approaches and drive adoption of change across the team
- **Interpersonal skills & collaboration** — build networks and alliances across functions and find common ground with a wide range of stakeholders
- **Communication** — clear written and verbal communication with strong presentation skills for both technical and business audiences
- **Ethical conduct** — instill trust; uphold high standards of ethics and corporate responsibility
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field — or equivalent experience
- 10+ years in data engineering / data operations, including 4+ years leading teams (ideally distributed onshore/offshore)
- Deep operational experience running Snowflake (on AWS) in production at scale
- Strong orchestration background (Airflow, dbt, Snowflake Tasks/Streams, or equivalent) and modern DataOps / SRE practices — monitoring, alerting, incident management, on-call
- Solid foundation in data warehousing, data modeling, and BI & analytics concepts
- Track record standing up reliability practices (SLAs/SLOs, runbooks, postmortems) and measurably improving pipeline reliability
- Working knowledge of Agile / Scrum and operational tracking with Jira / Confluence
- Excellent incident-command and stakeholder-communication skills under pressure
- Please note at this time we are unable to proceed with candidates who require visa sponsorship now or in the future
- Master's preferred
- Experience establishing an operations Center of Excellence and a distributed onshore/offshore, L1/L2/L3 support model
- Experience with a data-observability platform (e.g., Pantomath, Monte Carlo, or similar)
- Familiarity with data-quality / testing frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations, Soda) and data-contract practices
- Experience driving automation (including RPA) across data operations
- Healthcare data experience and working knowledge of HIPAA / PHI handling and controls
- Familiarity with medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), dbt, and OpenFlow-style ingestion
- Exposure to ModelOps / MLOps for production AI/ML workloads
- While location expectations vary by role, candidates within approximately 50 miles of a U.S. office are generally preferred to support collaboration when needed
Benefits
- 401k plan with employer match
- Flexible paid time off
- Holidays
- Parental leaves
- Life and disability insurance
- Health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage
- Flexible hybrid approach, with in-office presence guided by team and business needs rather than a fixed weekly schedule
- Discretionary bonus plans, commissions, or other incentives depending on the role
Company Overview