Senior Lead, Data Operations

Workiva

Data Operations Senior Lead responsible for operational excellence of data platforms at Workiva. Providing technical direction and guidance to ensure analytics systems perform reliably and at scale.

Posted 4/30/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $151,000 - $242,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AirflowBigQueryCloudETLGoJavaPythonScalaSplunkSQLTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Provide expert technical guidance and direction to an offshore contract team to ensure high-quality execution of platform operations, automation, and reliability projects.
Own the operational health and performance of the data platform.
Lead and drive incident response and management for platform-related production issues.
Design and implement monitoring frameworks to govern service-oriented architecture (SOA) efficiently and intelligently.
Reduce operational toil by building self-service workflows, "guardrails," and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions.
Managing the "traffic control" of data tasks (using tools like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect) to ensure complex dependencies are handled efficiently.
Ensuring the right people have access to the right data (RBAC - Role-Based Access Control) without slowing down the business.
Building automated "circuit breakers" that stop data from reaching the warehouse if it doesn't meet quality standards.
Partnering with Legal/Security teams to ensure data handling meets GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific regulations (HIPAA, SOX).
Managing the cloud budget (Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks costs) and predicting how much compute power the company will need as data volume grows.
Translating technical constraints into business impact.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
6+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Systems Engineering roles, with a deep focus on data infrastructure, including experience leading technical projects or teams
Proven ability to provide clear technical leadership, direction, and oversight to cross-functional or geographically distributed engineering teams (e.g., contract or offshore teams)
Deep understanding of data modeling, warehousing, and building scalable ETL/ELT pipelines
Hands-on experience with Snowflake and DBT a must. Expert in Snowflake SQL.
Expert-level hands-on experience with Terraform, Splunk, and Airflow or similar technologies required
High proficiency in Python and programming languages such as Java, Go, or Scala
Management of ingestion frameworks like Fivetran, CData, Census and Openflow
Experience with S3, Athena and Iceberg required

Benefits

Comp & perks

A discretionary bonus typically paid annually
Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire
401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

data infrastructuredata modelingdata warehousingETLELTSnowflake SQLTerraformPythonJavaGo

Soft Skills

technical leadershipdirectionoversightcross-functional collaborationincident responsecommunicationproblem-solvingproject managementteam managementorganizational skills