DataOps/MLOps Lead: CI/CD, Dagster on Azure Lakehouse

Protective Life; United States; On-site; USD 125,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with Company match

Paid time off

Job summary

Protective Life seeks a DataOps/MLOps Lead to own the platform and operating model for data and ML pipelines on Azure Databricks. You will set standards, automate the backbone, mentor engineers, and ensure reliability, security, cost, and auditability in a regulated insurance setting.

In this hands-on leadership role, you’ll drive CI/CD, Dagster orchestration, and governance, partnering with the ML engineering team to deploy, monitor, and retrain models while maintaining strong observability and

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data/ML/platform engineering or SRE/DevOps with production systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership — setting standards, automation, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong CI/CD expertise with Azure DevOps and Git workflows.
• Hands-on orchestration with Dagster and modern data stack on a Databricks lakehouse.

Responsibilities

• Own the DataOps/MLOps platform and operating model with automation.
• Lead CI/CD standards and pipelines in Azure DevOps for data pipelines and ML models.
• Standardize orchestration on Dagster with run observability.
• Operationalize ingestion and transformation stacks with dltHub and dbt.
• Build MLOps foundations: MLflow registry, model serving, monitoring.
• Establish data/model observability with SLAs/SLOs.
• Administer Databricks Lakehouse on Azure and governance.
• Manage infrastructure as code and environments (Terraform).
• Own reliability and incident practices; drive continuous improvement.
• Drive FinOps cost visibility across compute/storage.
• Automate governance and compliance; evidence collection.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring.

Skills

CI/CD expertise

Python

SQL

Dagster

Databricks

Azure

Terraform

Observability

Security/compliance

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Azure DevOps (ADO)

Dagster

dbt

MLflow

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Databricks Lakehouse

Job description

Protective Life seeks a DataOps/MLOps Lead to own the platform and operating model for data and ML pipelines on Azure Databricks. You will set standards, automate the backbone, mentor engineers, and ensure reliability, security, cost, and auditability in a regulated insurance setting.

In this hands-on leadership role, you’ll drive CI/CD, Dagster orchestration, and governance, partnering with the ML engineering team to deploy, monitor, and retrain models while maintaining strong observability and