Data Operations Manager

Data Operations Manager

Are you looking to make an impactful difference in your work, yourself, and your community? Why settle for just a job when you can land a career? At ICW Group, we are hiring team members who are ready to use their skills, curiosity, and drive to be part of our journey as we strive to transform the insurance carrier space. We're proud to be in business for over 50 years, and its change agents like yourself that will help us continue to deliver our mission to create the best insurance experience possible.

Headquartered in San Diego with regional offices located throughout the United States, ICW Group has been named for ten consecutive years as a top 50 performing P&C organization offering the stability of a large, profitable and growing company combined with a focus on all things people. It's our team members who make us an employer of choice and the vibrant company we are today. We strive to make both our internal and external communities better everyday! Learn more about why you want to be here!

Purpose Of The Job

The Data Operations Manager is a key role in ICW Group's digital evolution. This role will provide leadership and direction to a team of data engineering professionals to design, develop and implement data pipelines, data integration and data storage solutions such as data warehouses, lakes, relational and non-relational databases. The position will partner closely with IT Delivery and Engineering Managers, Business Intelligence, Data Governance and Data Science teams to enable data-driven decision-making, automation and optimization and solve business-significant data challenges. This role will drive the enablement of future state data capabilities in support of the enterprise's data and digital strategy.

Essential Duties And Responsibilities

Focuses on managing enterprise data architecture in support of the enterprise strategic initiatives and portfolio.

• Engages business and IT/data stakeholders, creating and building relationships.
• Maintains a deep understanding of how data is used in business processes and by business systems.
• Communicates the value of data engineering and its portfolio of services to the organization.
• Drives the evolution of the data engineering team's services and operating model.
• Facilitates alignment between business and IT and across the democratized IT landscape.
• Analyzes and translates business needs into long-term solution data models.
• Drives efficiencies through code improvement, consistency, automation, service delivery, and scalability.

Manages delivery of data solutions that ensure data integrity and information usability for enterprise-wide decision-making.

• Proactively drives the vision for data integration, data storage and modern/cloud data platform, defines and executes a plan to achieve that vision.
• Leads teams to build scalable data solutions that make the best use of traditional and cloud platforms (AWS or similar) by understanding the business, technology, and data landscape including real time data processing.
• Delivers large scale, high-performance data processing systems (batch and/or streaming) to drive business growth and improve the product experience.
• Works with data scientists and data analysts to develop solutions that ensure the data used for training and testing machine learning and AI models is clean, accurate, and relevant. Peer reviews data model designs for optimal storage and retrieval and to meet critical product and business requirements.
• Engages with key stakeholders, industry experts, and technical peers to understand technology and business requirements, industry trends and the broader data architecture landscape.
• Leads the development and maintenance of data strategies across multiple business areas.
• Maintains a strong understanding of the current landscape and proactively leads the analysis of the current technology environment to detect data deficiencies, gaps, and opportunities.
• Works with senior leadership to prioritize, initiate and implement technology efforts aimed at addressing identified opportunities.
• Collaborates in implementing components of data strategy – Master Data Management (MDM), Data Virtualization etc.

Oversees all planning and organizing for data engineering team projects.

• Collaborates with Enterprise Architecture, Technology, and project teams to ensure consistency of approach while maintaining governance requirements.
• Works closely with the broader engineering community to ensure that their solutions align with target architectures and technology roadmaps.
• Ensures that team activities operate within the policies and procedures of the organization. Tracks overall data initiatives and provides feedback or suggestions.
• Influences and communicates with all levels on business, information, complex technical subjects, and roadmaps.
• Serves as the interface between business and IT, ensuring that data technologies are consistent with the overall IT strategy. Educates business and IT partners on data integration architecture.
• Collaborates with the Enterprise Architecture team to drive tooling and standards to improve the productivity and quality of output for data engineers across the company.
• Contributes to data governance and data quality best practices including design reviews, unit testing, code reviews, and continuous integration and deployment.

Manages and leads a team of Data engineering Professionals.

• Provides tactical, and daily direction to data engineering team. Communicates Mission, Values, and other organization operating principles to direct and indirect reports.
• Fosters a culture of quality, personal accountability, and strong relationships with stakeholders and supporting IT teams.
• Oversees the performance management and development process for the team and performs performance management duties, development planning, and coaching for direct reports.
• Manages Department budget, technology and other resources, workloads, and customer requests for data services. Ensures adherence to all Company policies and procedures and Compliance responsibilities.
• Ensures data quality, adherence to IT security guidelines, profitability and other risk-related metrics for self and members of the team.

Supervisory Responsibilities

Directly supervises data engineering team members and carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with company policies and applicable laws. These responsibilities include interviewing, hiring, and training employees; planning, assigning, and directing work; conducting performance and salary reviews; rewarding and disciplining employees; addressing complaints and resolving problems; coaching, mentoring, and developing team members to further their skills and knowledge; creating and monitoring development plans; setting performance expectations and goals; forecasting staffing needs and planning for peak times and absences; enforcing department policies and procedures.

Education And Experience

• Bachelor's degree required with a major or emphasis in Computer Science, Engineering, MIS, or similar field. Additional experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Minimum 8 years of experience in IT and data engineering required.
• Minimum 3 years of experience in managing and leading IT and data teams, managing business processes, budgeting, and business office operations required.
• Minimum 5 years hands on exposure to data modeling, data warehousing, data integration (Cloud/Traditional), ETL/ELT pipelines required.
• Prior work experience in the insurance or financial services industries preferred.

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations

• Data or architecture-related certification strongly desired
• AWS Cloud Practitioner or more advanced AWS certification preferred

Knowledge And Skills

• Knowledge and experience with data movement tools such as Fivetran, SSIS, Profisee, Alteryx, and Informatica.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud data platforms and tools, including Snowflake, dbt Labs, and AWS services such as Redshift, S3, EC2, Glue, EMR, Kinesis, Lambda, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB.
• Proven experience authoring roadmap documents, project plans, and Root Cause Analyses (RCAs).
• Strong experience with database design, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, writing SQL scripts and complex SQL queries.
• Experience with modern data architectures including Data Lake, Data Mesh, and ELT pipelines.
• Working knowledge of key data management domains such as data modeling, integration, warehousing, data quality, security, and governance.
• Advanced knowledge of designing and setting current and future-state data integration architectures.
• Solid background in data modeling and performance tuning in both relational and NoSQL databases.
• Familiarity with batch and streaming data architectures and tools supporting real-time data ingestion and processing.
• Must have the ability to: Make decisions and recommendations on technology strategies while considering diverse options and business needs. Contribute valuable input to the strategic planning process. Persuade peers and leaders within and outside area of responsibility. Articulate and build support for a variety of initiatives. Present information clearly and effectively to diverse audiences. Build relationships with others in the organization to foster a strong internal network. Adjust to changing circumstances while still driving toward a clear outcome.