Director of Data Operations & Reliability

Zelis; New Jersey; Hybrid; USD 153,000 - 194,000; Full time

Job summary

Zelis is an AI-native company building the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) as the data foundation for analytics, AI, and agentic engineering. As Director, ZDC Operations, you will own run-state reliability and build a best-in-class DataOps/ DRE function across a distributed team, ensuring SLAs, data quality, and scalable automation.

You will lead on-call, monitoring, and incident management, collaborate with Snowflake administration, and drive continuous improvements in data pipelines and observability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in data engineering / data operations, incl. 4+ years leading teams (distributed).
• Deep operational experience running Snowflake (on AWS) in production at scale.

Responsibilities

• Establish a data operations CoE with distributed onshore/offshore support (L1/L2/L3).
• Own end-to-end run-state health for all ZDC data pipelines; define data SLAs/SLOs.

Skills

Snowflake on AWS

Airflow

dbt

SRE practices

Data observability

Data warehousing

MLOps / ModelOps

Incident command

Jira / Confluence

Data governance / data contracts

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / related field

Master's preferred

Tools

Airflow

dbt

Snowflake

Soda

Great Expectations

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Zelis is an AI-native company building the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) as the data foundation for analytics, AI, and agentic engineering. As Director, ZDC Operations, you will own run-state reliability and build a best-in-class DataOps/ DRE function across a distributed team, ensuring SLAs, data quality, and scalable automation.

You will lead on-call, monitoring, and incident management, collaborate with Snowflake administration, and drive continuous improvements in data pipelines and observability.