Senior DataOps & MLOps Platform Lead

Protective Life; Birmingham (AL); On-site; USD 125,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) with company match

Pension plan

Employee assistance program

Job summary

Protective Life seeks a DataOps/MLOps Lead to own the platform and operating model for data and ML systems on a Databricks Lakehouse on Azure. You will automate pipelines, establish Dagster-based orchestration, and lead CI/CD standards while mentoring engineers in a regulated insurance environment.

You will drive observability, governance, and secure data handling, balancing reliability with cost efficiency and regulatory requirements. This is a hands-on leadership role in Birmingham, AL.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data, ML, or platform engineering, or SRE/DevOps, with production data/ML experience
• Technical leadership — setting standards, automation, mentoring engineers
• Strong CI/CD expertise with Azure DevOps and Git workflows
• Hands-on orchestration experience with Dagster or equivalent and data stack (dltHub, dbt) on Databricks
• MLOps experience — MLflow, model serving, monitoring, retraining automation
• IaC and Azure administration (Terraform, compute/storage/identity)
• Strong Python and SQL for automation
• Security, access control, and compliant handling of sensitive data
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Responsibilities

• Own the DataOps/MLOps platform and operating model — paved paths, automation and tooling for pipelines and models
• Lead CI/CD standards and Azure DevOps pipelines for data/ML deployments
• Standardize Dagster orchestration with reusable assets and run observability
• Operationalize ingestion and transformation stack (dltHub, dbt) with automated testing
• Build MLOps foundations — MLflow registry, model serving, monitoring, retraining
• Establish data/model observability — freshness, quality, lineage, latency, drift
• Manage Databricks Lakehouse on Azure — Unity Catalog governance and access controls
• Manage infrastructure as code and environments (Terraform)
• Own reliability and incident practices — on-call, runbooks, RCA, continuous improvement
• Drive FinOps cost visibility across compute/storage/model serving
• Automate governance and compliance — audit logs, inventories, approvals
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers

Skills

CI/CD

Python

SQL

Observability/SRE

Leadership

Security/Compliance

Data/ML Automation

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Dagster

dbt

Databricks Lakehouse

Azure DevOps

Terraform

Job description

Protective Life seeks a DataOps/MLOps Lead to own the platform and operating model for data and ML systems on a Databricks Lakehouse on Azure. You will automate pipelines, establish Dagster-based orchestration, and lead CI/CD standards while mentoring engineers in a regulated insurance environment.

You will drive observability, governance, and secure data handling, balancing reliability with cost efficiency and regulatory requirements. This is a hands-on leadership role in Birmingham, AL.