Data Ops Lead

Brief Description

We are seeking a Data Ops Lead to own and advance the operational reliability, quality, and scalability of our cloud-based data platforms
. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, platform operations, and reliability
, supporting critical data pipelines that power analytics, reporting, and operational decision-making across oilfield and energy operations.

The Data Ops Lead will be responsible for ensuring that data is available, accurate, timely, and trustworthy
, while leading operational best practices across ingestion, processing, and delivery systems running primarily on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role with strong expectations for ownership, cross‑team collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Data Platform Operations

  • Own the day‑to‑day operational health of cloud‑based data pipelines and platforms

  • Ensure high data availability, freshness, accuracy, and completeness

  • Lead operational support for batch and streaming data workloads

• Data Reliability & Quality

  • Define and manage data SLAs, SLOs, and reliability metrics

  • Implement and maintain data quality checks, validations, and monitoring

  • Design processes for backfills, reprocessing, and failure recovery

• Cloud & Infrastructure

  • Operate and optimize GCP‑based data services, including Big Query, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and GKE

  • Partner with platform and SRE teams on scalability, performance, and cost optimization

  • Manage data infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

• Automation & Tooling

  • Build and maintain Python‑based automation for data operations and monitoring

  • Improve reliability and repeatability through standardized tooling and workflows

  • Support and enhance data orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow / Cloud Composer)

• Incident Response & Operational Excellence

  • Lead response to data incidents, including triage, mitigation, and root cause analysis

  • Drive post‑incident reviews and track corrective actions

  • Create and maintain runbooks, operational documentation, and playbooks

• CI/CD & Governance

  • Implement CI/CD best practices for data pipelines

  • Promote testing, version control, and deployment standards across data workflows

  • Ensure data platforms align with security, governance, and access control requirements

• Leadership & Collaboration

  • Act as a technical leader within the Data Ops function

  • Partner closely with:

    • Data engineering teams

    • SRE / platform engineering

    • Analytics and business stakeholders

  • Mentor engineers and help raise the operational maturity of the data organization

• 7+ years experience in Data Engineering, Data Ops, or Data Platform Operations

• 3+ years experience operating cloud‑based data platforms in production

• Strong hands‑on experience with Google Cloud Platform
  , including:

  • GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub (or equivalents)

  • Cloud Monitoring & Logging

  • Big Query

  • Dataflow

  • Data stream

  • IAM and networking

  • Composer/Airflow

  • Kubernetes: deployment, scaling, reliability patterns

  • Observability: GCP Cloud Monitoring, Logging

• Strong proficiency in Python for data pipelines, automation, and operational tooling

• Experience with data orchestration frameworks (Airflow preferred)

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

• Experience with Azure Dev Ops

• Proven experience leading data incident response and operational improvements

• Strong SQL skills for data analysis and troubleshooting

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field.

• 7+ years experience in Data Engineering, Data Ops, or Data Platform Operations

• 3+ years leading or owning production data platforms in a cloud environment

• Demonstrated technical leadership of data operations initiatives or teams

• Ability to understand and speak English at a level of proficiency allowing employee to issue, receive and respond to both safety and operations‑related directions in English

• Oil and Gas Industry knowledge

• Technology/Digital Industry knowledge