Manager, Data Operations

Meredith Corporation; Town of Liberty (NY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Paid time off (PTO)

401K with company match

Paid holidays

Parental leave

Job summary

People Inc. in New York is seeking a Manager, Data Operations to lead the design, reliability, and day-to-day execution of core data pipelines and analytics infrastructure, while managing a team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers.

The role blends hands-on technical leadership with people management, setting direction, prioritizing workstreams, developing talent, and aligning with Analytics, Product, and Technology.

Job description

About The Position

The Manager, Data Operations leads the design, reliability, and day‑to‑day execution of the company’s core data pipelines and analytics infrastructure while directly managing a team of Data Engineers and Analytics Engineers. This role combines hands‑on technical leadership with people management accountability, ensuring that data systems are scalable, trusted, well‑documented, and aligned with business priorities. The role is responsible for setting technical direction, prioritizing team work‑streams, developing talent, and ensuring cross‑functional alignment across Analytics, Product, and Technology. This is both a strategic leadership role and a hands‑on operational steward for the company’s data platform.

Hybrid NYC. This position is hybrid in‑office, with the ability to work remotely for up to 3 days per week.

About The Position’s Contributions

• 30% Data Engineering & Pipeline Operations
  • Own the design, reliability, and scalability of ingestion, transformation, and storage pipelines
  • Ensure ELT/ETL processes run with high uptime and strong data quality
  • Guide orchestration, monitoring, and performance optimization
  • Reduce operational fragility by promoting shared patterns and automation
• 30% Analytics Engineering & Data Modeling
  • Oversee development and maintenance of clean, tested, well‑documented data models (e.g., dbt)
  • Define standards for modeling and semantic consistency
  • Ensure downstream BI and analytics consumers have trusted, well‑structured datasets
• 20% Governance, Quality & Trust
  • Establish clear metric definitions and semantic models
  • Partner with Governance and Security teams on lineage, metadata, and access controls
  • Reduce metric inconsistencies and reporting ambiguity
  • Ensure compliance with privacy and security standards
• 20% Business Partnership & Communication
  • Serve as a data advisor to Analytics, Product, and business leadership
  • Translate business priorities into technical roadmaps
  • Communicate complex technical concepts and trade‑offs clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences
  • Prioritize investments based on measurable business impact

What You’ll Do

• Manage and mentor a team of data engineers responsible for building and maintaining core data models, dashboards, and scalable data products.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business needs, gather requirements, and deliver high‑quality data solutions that support reporting and decision‑making.
• Design, implement, and optimize performant, well‑documented data models that enable self‑service analytics and strategic initiatives.
• Define and champion engineering best practices around code quality, documentation, version control, and testing within analytics workflows.
• Lead or support ad‑hoc data analyses to uncover insights and drive business strategy.
• Stay up to date on industry trends and new technologies to continuously improve our data architecture, tooling, and processes.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of experience building and optimizing data pipelines using Python or similar programming languages.
• 5+ years of advanced SQL experience working with relational and distributed data systems (e.g., Hive, BigQuery).
• Hands‑on experience with dbt for data transformation and pipeline management.
• 2+ years of experience leading or mentoring a team of data or analytics engineers, or owning end‑to‑end delivery of large‑scale data products.
• Strong leadership and talent‑development skills.
• Excellent communication across technical and business audiences.
• Strong prioritization, decision‑making, and documentation discipline.
• Familiarity with cloud data platforms such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or AWS/GCP.
• Experience with data visualization tools such as Looker, Tableau, or similar is a plus.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Pay Range Salary

New York: $190,000 - $205,000

Other compensation may include annual bonuses, and short‑ and long‑term incentives. In addition, People Inc. provides to employees (and their eligible family members) a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, unlimited paid time off (PTO), adoption or surrogate assistance, donation matching, tuition reimbursement, basic life insurance, basic accidental death & dismemberment, supplemental life insurance, supplemental accident insurance, commuter benefits, short term and long term disability, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family care benefits, a generous 401K savings plan with a company match program, 10-12 paid holidays annually, and generous paid parental leave (birthing and non‑birthing parents).

It is the policy of People Inc. to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. Accommodation requests can be made by emailing [e-mail]. The Company participates in the federal E‑Verify program to confirm the identity and employment authorization of all newly hired employees. For further information about the E‑Verify program, please refer to https://www.e-verify.gov/employees.