Data Operations Lead

We are seeking a Data Ops Lead on behalf of a client. This role will own and advance the operational reliability, quality, and scalability of our cloud-based data platforms
. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, platform operations, and reliability
, supporting critical data pipelines that power analytics, reporting, and operational decision-making across oilfield and energy operations.

The Data Ops Lead will be responsible for ensuring that data is available, accurate, timely, and trustworthy
, while leading operational best practices across ingestion, processing, and delivery systems running primarily on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with strong expectations for ownership, cross-team collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Own the day-to-day operational health of cloud-based data pipelines and platforms
• Ensure high data availability, freshness, accuracy, and completeness
• Lead operational support for batch and streaming data workloads

• Define and manage data SLAs, SLOs, and reliability metrics
• Implement and maintain data quality checks, validations, and monitoring
• Design processes for backfills, reprocessing, and failure recovery
• Operate and optimize GCP-based data services, including Big Query, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and GKE
• Partner with platform and SRE teams on scalability, performance, and cost optimization
• Manage data infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

• Build and maintain Python-based automation for data operations and monitoring
• Improve reliability and repeatability through standardized tooling and workflows
• Support and enhance data orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow / Cloud Composer)

• Lead response to data incidents, including triage, mitigation, and root cause analysis
• Drive post-incident reviews and track corrective actions
• Create and maintain runbooks, operational documentation, and playbooks

• Promote testing, version control, and deployment standards across data workflows
• Ensure data platforms align with security, governance, and access control requirements
• Act as a technical leader within the Data Ops function
• Partner closely with:
  Data engineering teams, SRE / platform engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders, Mentor engineers and help raise the operational maturity of the data organization

• 7+ years experience in Data Engineering, Data Ops, or Data Platform Operations
• 3+ years experience operating cloud-based data platforms in production
• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform
  , including:
• GCP
  : GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub (or equivalents)
• Big Query
• Dataflow
• Data stream
• IAM and networking
• Composer/AIrflow
• Kubernetes: deployment, scaling, reliability patterns
• Strong proficiency in Python for data pipelines, automation, and operational tooling
• Experience with data orchestration frameworks (Airflow preferred)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Experience with Azure Devops
• Proven experience leading data incident response and operational improvements
• Strong SQL skills for data analysis and troubleshooting

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 7+ years experience in Data Engineering, Data Ops, or Data Platform Operations
• 3+ years leading or owning production data platforms in a cloud environment
• Demonstrated technical leadership of data operations initiatives or teams
• Ability to understand and speak English at a level of proficiency allowing employee to issue, receive and respond to both safety and operations-related directions in English