Sr. Data Platform Operations Lead

CIM is a community-focused real estate and infrastructure owner, operator, lender, and developer. Our team of experts works together to identify and create value in real assets, benefiting the communities in which we invest. Today, we are a diverse team of 900+ employees with projects across the Americas. The ideal candidate is a hands-on operator who takes personal ownership of platform reliability and stays calm and decisive under pressure, especially around quarter-end close and investor-reporting cycles. They are fluent in modern data platform operations on Databricks, disciplined about cost (FinOps), and as comfortable administering DevOps tooling and Infrastructure-as-Code as they are running an incident to root cause.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end incident and problem management for the data platform: detection, triage, resolution, and root-cause analysis across pipelines, jobs, and the downstream consumers; Own job-failure remediation and recovery, restoring critical data flows within targets calibrated to the close and investor-reporting calendars; Define and operate data freshness and data-quality monitoring, alerting, and SLA tracking against reporting deadlines; Author and maintain runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call procedures; lead post-incident reviews and drive corrective actions to closure; Carry on-call responsibility on a severity-based basis, with heightened coverage around quarter-end close and investor-reporting cycles; Own day-to-day operations of the Azure Databricks Lakehouse: cluster policies, instance pools, SQL warehouse sizing, serverless configuration, and runtime currency; Maintain workflow and Delta Live Tables pipeline reliability and performance at the platform level; Own end-to-end FinOps for the data platform: resource tagging, budget policies, and consumption monitoring via Databricks system tables; Deliver cost transparency and chargeback/showback by business line; Right-size compute and drive continuous optimization of the platform's cost-to-serve; Forecast platform spend, flag variances early, and partner with Finance and the Head of Enterprise Data Management on the platform budget; Administer the DevOps toolchain for data (GitHub organization, repositories and access, CI runners, and pipeline secrets); Own and deploy CI/CD for data assets using GitHub Actions and Databricks Asset Bundles; Build and administer the Infrastructure-as-Code toolchain (Terraform with the Databricks provider, and Azure IaC) and own the environment-promotion and release-management model; Establish the observability strategy and data-quality gates; Set the deployment standards and review gates for the wider Data Engineering team; Own Databricks account and workspace administration, partnering with Infrastructure on provisioning, identity federation (SCIM and SSO via Entra ID), and group and entitlement management; Partner with Infrastructure on platform security (Private Link, network connectivity, secret scopes, token governance, and exfiltration controls); Drive outcomes across a matrixed organization without sole positional authority; Coordinate platform change with the firm's data-governance and change-management processes

Requirements

8–12 years in data platform operations, DataOps, or a closely related discipline, with demonstrated hands-on production-support ownership; Strong, current Databricks platform operations experience (compute, cost and FinOps governance, SQL warehouses, workflows/DLT, and runtime management on Azure); Hands-on experience administering and deploying CI/CD and DevOps tooling (e.g., GitHub / GitHub Actions), Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), and observability tooling for a data platform; A proven track record of partnering with an infrastructure / cloud team on identity, networking, and platform security; Evidence of driving cross-functional outcomes in a matrixed environment and exercising sound, decisive judgment under operational pressure; Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

Experience in financial services, alternative investments, or real estate / infrastructure asset management, with familiarity with close cycles and investor-reporting calendars; Databricks Academy Accreditation – Platform Administrator, and/or Databricks Certified Data Engineer (Associate or Professional); Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400); HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate; Experience operating BI / reporting platforms such as Domo as downstream consumers of a data platform