Role: Senior Data Operations Engineer
Department: Data & AI Team
Reports To: Data Operations Manager
Location: Auburn Hills, MI
Work Model: Hybrid
Experience: 8+ years of production/data operations experience
Job Description
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Data Operations Engineer to own and support batch jobs, production data pipelines, and operational stability across the data engineering ecosystem. The role involves production support, incident management, performance optimization, pipeline troubleshooting, cloud/data-platform administration, and collaboration with business and technical teams supporting Volkswagen domain applications and data platforms.
Key Responsibilities
Operations & Production Support
- Monitor and support batch jobs across enterprise data engineering pipelines.
- Proactively identify and resolve job failures and production issues.
- Participate in on-call rotations and provide timely production incident response.
- Manage incidents, changes, and problems in accordance with ITIL processes.
- Monitor ticket queues and ensure timely resolution within defined SLAs.
- Support application and infrastructure components, including Tomcat application servers.
Data Engineering & Technical Support
- Develop, troubleshoot, and optimize Python and Java code used for batch processing and pipeline operations.
- Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and implement code/query optimization.
- Support end-to-end ETL/ELT data pipelines.
- Manage and troubleshoot AWS Glue jobs, crawlers, catalogs and workflows.
- Support AWS S3 data lake structures and RDS databases.
- Support Oracle databases and OLTP systems, including query tuning.
- Administer and troubleshoot the Cloudera Hadoop ecosystem, including HDFS and Impala.
- Work with Apache Spark for distributed processing and batch troubleshooting.
- Support downstream Tableau and Power BI reporting environments.
- Manage code libraries and dependencies and ensure compatibility and currency.
Governance, Quality & Security
- Act as a gate reviewer for code promoted to production.
- Verify operational readiness, testing, documentation and rollback plans before deployment.
- Review pull requests and enforce Git branching and merge standards.
- Identify and coordinate timely remediation of security vulnerabilities.
- Support the complete lifecycle of applications and pipelines, including upgrades, deprecation and decommissioning.
Business & Stakeholder Support
- Develop an understanding of Volkswagen business applications and processes to support effective troubleshooting.
- Work with business SMEs and technical stakeholders to translate production issues into actionable solutions.
- Collaborate effectively with distributed and cross-functional teams.
Required Skills & Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in Data Operations, Production Support, Data Engineering or Data Platform Operations.
- Strong proficiency in Python and Java.
- Hands-on experience with AWS Glue, S3 and RDS.
- Strong experience with Cloudera/Hadoop, HDFS and Impala.
- Hands-on experience with Apache Spark.
- Strong understanding of ETL/ELT pipelines and data-processing workflows.
- Experience with Oracle databases and OLTP systems.
- Working knowledge of Tableau and Power BI.
- Experience with Tomcat administration and support.
- Strong knowledge of Git, pull requests, code reviews and branching strategies.
- Strong understanding of ITIL, including incident, change and problem management.
- Experience supporting production applications with on-call and senior-level escalation ownership.
- Strong troubleshooting, analytical and communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in automotive or manufacturing domains.
- Experience with Volkswagen-related applications or environments.
- Experience acting as a production release/gate reviewer.
- AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Cloudera certifications.
- Familiarity with DevSecOps, Docker, OpenShift and Terraform.
- Experience with CI/CD security, automated vulnerability scanning and secrets management.
- Knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID and IBM Security Access Manager (ISAM).
Key Technologies
Python | Java | AWS Glue | AWS S3 | AWS RDS | Cloudera | Hadoop | HDFS | Impala | Apache Spark | Oracle | OLTP | ETL/ELT | Tomcat | Tableau | Power BI | Git | ITIL | CI/CD | DevSecOps | Docker | OpenShift | Terraform
Please share profiles with strong hands-on production support experience, particularly in AWS Glue, Cloudera/Hadoop, Spark, Python/Java, ETL/ELT and ITIL-based operations.
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