Director, Data Engineering, International Banking, Toronto, Mexico, Colombia, Peru

Scotiabank; Toronto; On-site; CAD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Scotiabank in Toronto seeks a Director, DataOps to lead enterprise Databricks operations across Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. You will drive reliability, security, and scalable data delivery in a multi-country environment.

You will manage a distributed team, define operating models, implement CI/CD for data workloads, and partner with cybersecurity, risk, and architecture teams to meet regulatory requirements and cost targets.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data/platform engineering with leadership of distributed teams.
• Proven experience operating enterprise-scale data platforms in production.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of Azure Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake.
• Strong CI/CD, DevSecOps, and data governance experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead regional DataOps organization across Mexico, Caribbean, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay.
• Define operating objectives, performance expectations, and delivery metrics.
• Oversee Databricks platform operations, governance, and security.
• Drive cost optimization and FinOps for cloud data workloads.
• Partner with cybersecurity, risk, and compliance teams.

Skills

Team leadership

DataOps & Platform Leadership

Azure Databricks

CI/CD for data

Security & Compliance

Stakeholder Management

Python/SQL/Scala

FinOps / cost optimization

Cloud governance

Multi-country coordination

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Data Engineering

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

Azure Databricks

Terraform

Azure Monitor

Databricks Workflows/Jobs

Job description

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Title: Director,Data Engineering, International Banking, Toronto, Mexico, Colombia, Peru

Requisition ID: 274865

Join a purpose driven winning team, committed to results, in an inclusive and high-performing culture.

Role

The Director, DataOps is a senior technology leadership role accountable for the operational excellence, reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency of the Azure Databricks platform and related data operations across Mexico, Caribbean, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay.

This role leads a distributed team responsible for production data pipeline operations, CI/CD enablement, platform onboarding, observability, incident management, governance controls, and continuous improvement of the Lakehouse operating model. The Director will partner closely with Data Engineering, Architecture, Platform Engineering, Cybersecurity, Risk, Compliance, and business stakeholders to ensure Databricks-based data products are delivered safely, reliably, and in alignment with regional priorities and enterprise standards.

Is this role right for you? In this role you will:

Regional Leadership & Team Management:

• Lead, coach, and scale a regional DataOps organization across Mexico, Caribbean, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, with clear accountability for production operations, engineering discipline, service reliability, and continuous improvement.
• Define operating objectives, performance expectations, delivery metrics, and talent development plans for engineers, operations leads, and platform support roles.
• Coordinate priorities across countries, time zones, and partner teams, ensuring transparent execution, consistent standards, and timely escalation of risks, blockers, and service-impacting issues.

DataOps Strategy, Operating Model & Execution:

• Define and implement the DataOps operating model for Azure Databricks, including platform onboarding, environment management, release controls, production support, change management, and operational governance.
• Drive automation across the data delivery lifecycle, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, deployment gates, code promotion, rollback patterns, and release traceability.
• Establish and monitor service-level objectives for data pipelines and platform operations, including availability, data freshness, latency, job success rates, incident response, recovery time, and data quality.

Databricks Platform Operations & Reliability:

• Own the operational readiness of Azure Databricks workspaces, clusters, jobs, workflows, notebooks, libraries, secrets, service principals, and production deployment patterns.
• Partner with Platform Engineering and Architecture to define secure, scalable workspace patterns, environment separation, cluster policies, runtime standards, capacity planning, and platform guardrails.
• Build a strong observability practice for pipelines and platform services, including monitoring, alerting, logging, operational dashboards, root-cause analysis, and problem management.
• Oversee the design, deployment, and optimization of cloud-based data infrastructure supporting Azure Databricks, including secure connectivity, storage integration, workload isolation, and scalable compute patterns.
• Lead FinOps discipline for Databricks workloads, including cost transparency, tagging, budget controls, rightsizing, auto-termination, utilization reporting, capacity forecasting, and optimization of compute spend.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise cloud, cybersecurity, privacy, data residency, and regulatory requirements, coordinating with control functions and regional stakeholders as needed.

Governance, Security & Data Controls:

• Define and enforce governance practices for Databricks and lakehouse assets, including Unity Catalog adoption, access management, data lineage, auditability, ownership models, and production data controls.
• Establish secure operating patterns for service principals, secrets management, privileged access, environment segregation, and production job execution.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Risk, Compliance, and Architecture teams to ensure controls are embedded early in the delivery lifecycle and continuously validated through operational reporting.

Stakeholder Engagement & Operational Excellence:

• Serve as the operational owner and escalation point for Databricks DataOps across regional, global, platform, architecture, security, and business stakeholder groups.
• Communicate operational health, delivery progress, risks, incidents, remediation plans, platform dependencies, and investment needs to senior leadership.
• Establish executive-ready KPIs and dashboards covering platform adoption, pipeline reliability, SLA performance, data quality, incidents, cost efficiency, onboarding progress, and engineering productivity.
• Stay current with Databricks, Azure, DataOps, DevSecOps, FinOps, observability, and data engineering practices, translating relevant capabilities into practical standards for the organization.
• Develop reusable playbooks, templates, reference architectures, onboarding guides, runbooks, support models, and engineering standards to accelerate safe and consistent adoption of Databricks.

Do you have the skills that will enable you to succeed in this role? We'd love to work with you if you have:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or DataOps, including at least 5 years in a leadership role managing distributed technical teams.
• Proven experience operating enterprise-scale data platforms in production, including incident management, release management, monitoring, SLA/SLO governance, and continuous improvement.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of Azure Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Databricks Workflows/Jobs, workspace administration, cluster policies, runtime management, and integration with Azure data services.
• Strong expertise in CI/CD and DevSecOps for data workloads, including Git-based development, automated testing, deployment pipelines, release gates, code quality controls, and rollback mechanisms.
• Demonstrated ability to implement security, privacy, compliance, auditability, identity, access, and data governance controls in cloud data environments.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, preferably Terraform, and monitoring/observability solutions such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Databricks system tables, or equivalent tools.
• Relevant certifications preferred, such as Azure Data Engineer Associate, Azure Solutions Architect, Azure DevOps Engineer, Databricks certifications, Terraform Associate, or equivalent experience.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, SQL, or Scala.
• Experience leading cost optimization and capacity planning for cloud data platforms, including budget controls, usage analytics, workload placement, and performance tuning.

Success Measures:

• Improved production reliability of Databricks pipelines and reduced recurring incidents.
• Faster and safer delivery through standardized CI/CD, automated testing, and controlled release practices.
• Clear operational visibility through dashboards for SLAs, pipeline health, cost, onboarding, incidents, and data quality.
• Strong governance posture through consistent access controls, auditability, lineage, and documented ownership.
• Optimized Databricks consumption through proactive FinOps practices, capacity planning, and workload tuning.

Additional Considerations:

• Experience operating in highly regulated, multi-country, multicultural environments, preferably in financial services or banking.
• Ability to travel regionally as required.
• Spanish and English fluency preferred.
• Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex platforms, risk, and operational topics for senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

What's in it for you?

• We are technology partners who help the business transform how our employees around the world work
• We have an inclusive and collaborative working environment that encourages creativity, curiosity, and celebrates success!
• You'll get to work with and learn from diverse industry leaders, who have hailed from top technology companies around the world
• We foster an environment of innovation and continuous learning
• We care about our people, allowing them to design how they work to deliver amazing results
• We offer a competitive total rewards package, including a performance bonus, company matching programs (on pension & profit sharing), and generous vacation

Location(s): Canada : Ontario : Toronto || Colombia : Bogota : Bogota || Mexico : Ciudad de México : Mexico

Scotiabank is a leading bank in the Americas. Guided by our purpose: "for every future", we help our customers, their families and their communities achieve success through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets.

At Scotiabank, we value the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to the Bank, and are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. If you require accommodation (including, but not limited to, an accessible interview site, alternate format documents, ASL Interpreter, or Assistive Technology) during the recruitment and selection process, please let our Recruitment team know. We thank all applicants for their interest in a career at Scotiabank; however, only those candidates who are selected for an interview will be contacted.