Migration Lead - SAS to Databricks

Role Summary

Migration Lead with strong SAS background to drive an end‑to‑end SAS to Databricks modernization program . The individual will own discovery, migration strategy, execution planning, and governance , working closely with business stakeholders, SAS SMEs, and Databricks engineering teams to ensure functional parity, performance validation, and scalable cloud adoption.

Key Responsibilities

Migration Leadership & Governance

• Lead SAS to Databricks migration initiatives across discovery, PoC, pilot, and production scale phases
• Act as the primary migration authority , coordinating between business, data engineering, and platform teams
• Define migration waves, dependency mapping, rollout strategy, and risk mitigation plans

SAS Estate Discovery & Assessment

• Perform SAS inventory analysis , covering:
• SAS Base programs, Macros, PROC SQL
• Statistical / actuarial models
• SAS datasets, external data sources, scheduled jobs, and batch dependencies
• Identify business‑critical logic, regulatory reporting, SLA‑bound workloads , and transformation complexity

Migration Strategy & Execution

• Define target‑state architecture on Databricks (Azure or AWS) aligned with best practices
• Drive conversion approaches:
• SAS → PySpark / Spark SQL
• Handling SAS quirks, data type handling, null logic, numeric precision, and edge cases
• Oversee implementation across Dev / Test / Prod , including CI/CD and environment promotion

Validation & Quality Assurance

• Ensure functional equivalence between SAS and Databricks outputs:
• Record counts
• Aggregations
• Statistical results and reports
• Validate non‑functional requirements : performance, scalability, cost efficiency
• Review data migration quality dashboards / observability and exception reporting

Stakeholder & Client Engagement

• Work directly with business custodians of SAS models to ensure no loss of analytical flexibility
• Present migration progress, risks, and outcomes to client leadership and data governance forums
• Support pre‑sales conversations, solution walkthroughs, and scale‑up planning when required