Director, Data Platforms and Tooling

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. So, let’s get to it!

Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients.

You bring a unique blend of personality and professional expertise to your work, inspiring others with your passion and dedication. Your career is a testament to your diverse experiences, community involvement, and the valuable lessons you've learned along the way. You are more than just your resume; you are a reflection of your achievements, the knowledge you've gained, and the personal interests that shape who you are.

Zelis is becoming an AI-Native company, and the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) is the data foundation that our analytics, AI, and agentic engineering stand on. The Director, Data Platforms & Tooling owns that foundation's engineering layer:
Snowflake platform engineering and scalability, foundational tooling, CI/CD and Dev Ops for data, and platform governance and security — including the PHI/DLP guardrails required for healthcare data. This leader sets the reference architecture and standards that the other ZDC teams build against.

This is a builder-leader role: accountable for a production-grade, secure, scalable platform — not a coordination seat.

• Snowflake platform engineering & scalability — own platform architecture, scalability, and roadmap across data-warehouse, data-lake, and Data Sharing use cases, including open table formats (Apache Iceberg on AWS S3); manage multiple Snowflake accounts (consolidation, migration, modernization); design for resilience (replication, disaster recovery / failover); ensure the platform scales with ingestion volume, AI workloads, and business demand.
• Foundational tooling, CI/CD & Dev Ops for data — build and own the data Dev Ops stack: version control, CI/CD for Snowflake / dbt objects, environment automation, infrastructure-as-code, secrets management (Vault / AWS Secrets Manager), and release discipline.
• dbt project administration & standards — own dbt project configuration, model architecture standards, test-coverage enforcement, and model-promotion workflows across environments.
• Platform governance, security & PHI/DLP guardrails — set and enforce governance, security, and data-protection standards (masking, access control, tokenization, encryption, Snowflake Horizon) across environments; partner with Security and Compliance on HIPAA / PHI.
• Reference architecture & standards — define the patterns, standards, and guardrails the other teams adopt — including medallion layering (Bronze/Silver/Gold), semantic views, and ELT/ETL patterns; act as the technical authority for platform decisions.
• Snowflake capability adoption — evaluate emerging Snowflake features (e.g., Cortex AI, Horizon, Data Sharing) and drive adoption to improve performance, scalability, security, and cost.
• Lead & grow the platform team — build and lead the platform engineering, tooling, and release-engineering function; partner closely with the Snowflake administration function on platform standards and reference architecture.
• Enable the AI layer — ready the platform for Cortex AI / Relational AI and agentic workloads (governed access to semantic / ontology layers, safe compute patterns).
• Cost & Fin Ops stewardship — own platform-level cost governance and consumption efficiency in partnership with Data Operations.

• 10+ years in data platform / data engineering, including 4+ years in engineering leadership.
• Deep Snowflake platform architecture experience at enterprise scale, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
• Strong Dev Ops / CI/CD / IaC background for data platforms (Terraform, dbt, schema change, Git-based workflows).
• Proven ownership of platform governance and…