Role: Data Operations Lead
Location: Chicago, IL, Mansfield, MA, Dallas, TX (hybrid)
Duration: 6 months contract to hire
POSITION SUMMARY:
The Data Operations Lead reports to the Senior Director, Enterprise Data & Analytics.
Full-Time In Office/Hybrid/Remote: Hybrid preferred
Grade: Senior Manager / Director (based on experience) This role owns the day-to-day operational excellence of the Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) and Master Data Management (MDM) platforms. The successful candidate will establish a reliable run model (monitoring, incident management, ticket intake, SLAs), reduce operational risk through automation and standards, and partner with engineering, MDM, security, and business stakeholders to ensure data is trusted, available, and fit for use.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Own EDL and MDM production operations: monitoring, incident response, problem management, and service health reporting.
- Stand up and manage the Data Run model: intake triage, prioritization, escalation paths, on-call/coverage plans, and SLAs.
- Maintain and improve platform reliability: data freshness, pipeline uptime, failure recovery, and controlled releases.
- Drive root cause analysis and prevention: post-incident reviews, corrective actions, and recurring issue elimination.
- Author and maintain runbooks, SOPs, operational dashboards, and knowledge base documentation.
- Coordinate with offshore/contract resources for ticket execution and platform support; ensure quality and accountability.
- Partner with Data Engineering/Architecture to implement operational controls (alerts, automated retries, data quality checks).
- Support major programs (ERP migrations, integrations, reporting enablement) by ensuring operational readiness and cutover support.
- Ensure adherence to security, access, and change management practices in partnership with IT and Security.
COMPETENCIES:
Operational leadership mindset with strong ownership and accountability.
Ability to translate ambiguous issues into structured triage and action plans under pressure.
Strong stakeholder communication: clear status, risks, and decisions across technical and business audiences.
Continuous improvement orientation (automation-first, measurable SLAs, reduced toil).
Proven ability to lead distributed teams and vendors to outcomes.
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE:
- 8 12+ years of experience supporting enterprise data platforms in production (data lake/warehouse, ETL/ELT, MDM).
- 4+ years leading operations/support teams or acting as a platform owner in a complex environment.
- Working knowledge of cloud data ecosystems (AWS preferred), job orchestration, and monitoring/alerting practices.
- Strong SQL and data troubleshooting skills; understanding of data quality dimensions and controls.
- Experience with ticketing/ITSM processes (incident/problem/change) and establishing SLAs.
- Preferred: experience supporting MDM tools (e.g., Stibo or similar) and/or ERP migration programs.
- Ability to successfully pass a background check post offer acceptance.
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