Manager, Unified Data Platform & AI Engineering

Manager, Unified Data Platform & AI Engineering – Advan Six

Advan Six plays a critical role in global supply chains, innovating and delivering essential products for our customers across a wide variety of end markets and applications that touch people’s lives. We innovate in the industries of nylon solutions, chemical intermediates, and plant nutrients, guided by our core values of Safety, Integrity, Accountability and Respect.

We provide industry‑competitive benefits focused on employee well‑being, including health, dental, vision, wellness programs, paid vacation, 401(k) with company match, tuition reimbursement, and more.

This strategic role will own the design, build, and operation of Advan Six’s unified digital data platform, spanning IT and OT, and the engineering lifecycle for advanced analytics and AI applications. The leader manages a 3–5 person team, coordinates embedded vendor pods, and delivers a governed Unified Data Layer, robust data products, and production‑grade machine‑learning services that power operations and corporate functions.

• Platform & Architecture
  • Own the Unified Data Layer reference architecture.
  • Define and operate secure OT/IT integration patterns.
  • Partner with SAP teams to integrate S/4
    
    HANA and SAP Data Sphere into the semantic layer strategy.
• Data Engineering & Productization
  • Lead engineering for ingestion (batch/CDC/streaming), transformation (SQL/PySpark), testing, observability, and SLAs.
  • Implement reusable data product patterns: naming conventions, contracts, quality rules, SCD handling, and documentation “readmes.”
  • Expose governed access for Power BI, APIs, and Copilot/agents; prevent direct system scraping.
• ML & MLOps
  • Stand up ML platform services: feature store, model registry, experiment tracking, inference endpoints, monitoring (drift, accuracy, latency), and A/B controls.
  • Partner with Data Science to product ionize models with SLOs and rollback runbooks.
• Reliability, Security, and Fin Ops
  • Establish CI/CD for data and ML (branching, environments, approvals, blue/green).
  • Implement observability: pipeline health, freshness, data quality, lineage coverage, cost dashboards, and alerting/on‑call.
  • Enforce RBAC, secrets management, PII/HSE classifications, data retention, and DLP alignment with the Power Platform Center of Excellence.
• Team & Vendor Leadership
  • Manage a 3–5 FTE engineering team; recruit, coach, and develop talent.
  • Direct vendor pods for ingestion, historian connectors, Data Sphere modeling, and BI enablement; define DoD, SLAs, and knowledge transfer to insource sustainably.
  • Collaborate with Data Governance/MDM, Reporting & BI, Automation, Cyber/IT, and plant controls teams.
• Governance & Quality
  • Embed data quality rules, lineage, KPI canon, and MDM keys/survivorship into pipelines.
  • Champion documentation, runbooks, post‑incident reviews, and change control—especially for OT integrations.

• Minimum 7 years in data/platform engineering with 3+ years leading teams or team leads.
• Proven delivery of a Lakehouse or equivalent enterprise data platform and streaming/CDC pipelines.
• Strong hands‑on with Azure data stack; or equivalent in AWS/GCP with ability to translate to Azure.
• Deep SQL and one major programming language (Python preferred);
  PySpark experience for large‑scale transforms.
• Practical MLOps/Dev Ops:
  Git‑based CI/CD, IaC, model registry/monitoring, containerized services, observability.
• Understanding of OT systems and historians, DCS/PLC data, OPC UA/MQTT patterns, and OT cybersecurity considerations (ISA‑95/99).
• Working knowledge of SAP S/4
  
  HANA data structures and SAP Data Sphere semantic modeling; ability to partner with SAP teams.
• Familiarity with Power BI consumption patterns (semantic models, RLS) and integration with certified datasets/APIs.
• Manufacturing or process industry experience strongly preferred.

The expected base pay for this position is $130,700 – $196,100. Hired applicants will be eligible for paid holidays, paid time off including vacation, eligibility to purchase company stock, tuition reimbursement, and a 401(k) with a competitive company match.

All families are eligible for medical, dental and…