Assistant Director of Data Platform Engineering

At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference. 

What's the role?

Data plays a critical role in bringing financial security to millions of clients every day at Northwestern Mutual.  The platforms providing data need to be available and performing to allow that to happen.  The Assistant Director of Data Platform Engineering will be accountable for the operations and tuning of large-scale data solutions used across the company.  This position will lead and manage data engineers which support the data processing and datastores which are essential for the company to do daily business.  The ideal person for this role will have strong data engineering and infrastructure skills, is passionate about data, delivers superior customer service and is constantly looking to improve themselves, their team and everything around them.

Accountabilities:

• Responsible for the availability and performance of on-prem and cloud data platforms (the data movement, the data processing and the data storage)
• Deliver on service level agreements through processes such as incident management, change management, problem management, escalation management, capacity and performance management and operational KPI reporting and analytics
• Drive continuous improvement through operational measurement and analytics
• Establish and maintain effective relationships with data consumers, suppliers and infrastructure teams
• Manage relationships with technology vendors including licensing, financials and service management
• Lead business continuity and disaster recovery planning and execution for team
• Manage on-call rotation and serve as incident coordinator / leader as necessary
   
  Bring Your Best!
   
  Ideal Skills to Succeed

• Expertise with ETL/ELT and data management tools and technologies such as Informatica, DB2, Netezza, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, Glue, SSIS, Spark, Hadoop, etc.
• Build and develop strong engineering practices and engineering teams.
• Demonstrated success in coaching and mentoring team members both onshore and offshore.
• Passion for operational excellence, problem solving, and ownership in accomplishing challenging goals.
• Security and data protection mindset using encryption (in motion and at rest), privileges, access, authorization, masking and retention
• Communicate, escalate and negotiate with the vendors and technology providers.
• Form strong partnerships with internal infrastructure teams which assist in the provisioning and management of data and compute technology.
• Strong leadership, communication skills with demonstrated technical and analytical skills
• Cool under pressure and can manage crises and conflicts
• Strong project management and tracking competency that ensure scope is completed on time and within budget
• Continuously upgrade own technical skills, to understand and influence architecture and supporting infrastructure
   
  Preferred Experience:

• Team lead or prior leadership experience
• Minimum of 5 years of experience working with data management environments (OLAP, OLTP, data cubes, data warehouses, data lakes)
• Minimum of 5 years of experience working with ETL/ELT technologies (Informatica, SSIS, Java, Python)
• Minimum of 3 years of experience with IT Service Management framework (ITIL, MOF or similar )
• Minimum of 2 years of experience with AWS computing and data management services (Aurora, RDS, Redshift, Database Migration Service)
• Knowledge and experience with CI/CD automation tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc. 
• Knowledge and experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management tooling such as Terraform and CloudFormation
• Knowledge and experience with database migration tools such as Flyway
• Project management experience in Agile, Waterfall, and Kanban methodologies
• Knowledge of data privacy regulations (HIPAA, NYDFS, CCPA)
• Knowledge and experience with container systems (Docker) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)
• Log aggregation experience (Splunk, Syslog, Elastic Stack, etc.)
• Knowledge of insurance and financial services industry systems and previous exposure/experience in Information Technology

Grow your career with a best-in-class company that puts our client’s interests at the center of all we do. Get started now! 

We are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Req ID: 26924
Position Type: Regular Full Time
Education Experience: Bachelor's Desired
Employment Experience: 6-8 years
Licenses/Certifications:
FLSA Status: Exempt
Posting Date: 10/30/2019