Lead Data Platform Administrator

Lead Platform Administrator

CLA is a top 10 national professional services firm where our purpose is to create opportunities every day, for our clients, our people, and our communities through industry-focused wealth advisory, digital, audit, tax, consulting, and outsourcing services. Even with more than 8,500 people, 130 U.S. locations, and a global reach, we promise to know you and help you.

CLA is dedicated to building a culture that invites different beliefs and perspectives to the table, so we can truly know and help our clients, communities, and each other.

We're seeking a Lead Platform Administrator, this role drives operational excellence, reliability, and governance across the enterprise data and analytics platform. This role is operations-first, combining platform engineering, infrastructure governance, and incident management to ensure the platform is stable, scalable, secure, and production-ready always.

The ideal candidate brings strong hands-on experience across Databricks, Terraform, Kubernetes, API Management (APIM), and cloud data platforms, with a focus on operational management, automation, and continuous improvement.

About the Role:

• Own day-to-day operations of the enterprise data platforms, ensuring high availability, performance, and resilience.
• Manage and optimize compute environments, including:
• Kubernetes-based & Databricks computes platforms.
• Ensure platform architecture is operationalized, scalable, and aligned with enterprise standards.
• Provide escalated support and troubleshooting; oversee data governance, access control, and catalog services, including external access controls such as service principals, SQL warehouses, Delta Sharing, and equivalent platform capabilities.
• Drive cost optimization, capacity planning, and performance turning across platform services.
• Ensure consistent provisioning and configuration of: Compute, networking, storage, and access layers
• Govern environment consistency across Dev / Test / Prod via automated deployment pipelines.
• Partner with engineering teams to eliminate manual operations through automation-first practices.
• Own incident management lifecycle: Detection, Triage, Resolution, Root Cause Analysis, Prevention
• Lead response to critical platform incidents and escalations.
• Establish and maintain:
• Runbooks
• Playbooks
• Define and enforce platform DevOps standards, including CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, environment promotion, and automated compliance controls across the platform ecosystem
• Support controlled promotion of assets across environments with auditability.
• Lead implementation of monitoring and observability frameworks across: Databricks, Kubernetes, APIM and equivalents platforms.
• Oversee development of dashboards, alerts, and health checks.
• Ensure proactive issue detection and preventative maintenance.
• Provide leadership and direction for associate platform engineers and administrators.
• Partners with architecture, data engineering, and governance teams to align platform operations with business priorities.

What you will need

6 years of relevant experience required; supervisory experience a plus

Bachelor's degree is required. Combination of relevant experience, education, and training may be accepted in lieu of degree. Degree in computer science preferred

Technical Competencies

• Deep understanding of enterprise data, analytics, and compute platforms, including cloud data services, analytics tools, and Kubernetes environments.
• Ability to define and enforce platform standards for security, governance, automation, CI/CD, and operational excellence.
• Experience leading DevOps and platform engineering practices, including infrastructure‑as‑code and environment lifecycle management.
• Strong knowledge of cloud cost management, scalability, and reliability engineering.
• Ability to evaluate and guide adoption of emerging platform technologies.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities Click here to learn about your hiring rights.

Wellness at CLA

To support our CLA family members, we focus on their physical, financial, social, and emotional well-being and offer comprehensive benefit options that include health, dental, vision, 401k and much more.

To view a complete list of benefits click here.