Data Operations Manager

Data Operations Manager (VP) | Data Platform / DataOps
Dublin | Permanent | Hybrid

Background

The Panel is partnering with a leading international aviation finance business to recruit a Data Operations Manager for its Dublin office. The role sits within the Data & Analytics team and is accountable for keeping the company's data platform running every day: pipelines, data warehouse, refreshes, monitoring, incidents, data quality controls, and the suppliers who support them. It is the data equivalent of an IT operations or service manager, and closer to engineering than to business data operations.

The production environment is the Microsoft Azure stack: Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL Managed Instance and Power BI, with Copilot and data agents in use. The business wants a solid, healthy data platform aligned with best practice, with quick response times and reports that are on time and, where possible, real-time.

This is a hands-on VP role. You will manage the platform and the suppliers who support it rather than a team, and you will be close enough to the technology to diagnose problems and review partners' work, not just report on them.

Responsibilities

1. Be accountable for the data platform working every day: uptime, on-time refreshes and trusted data.
2. Act as the senior escalation point when something breaks, lead root-cause analysis, and own the permanent fix.
3. Run monitoring, alerting and automation across data and reporting pipelines, and meet agreed SLAs.
4. Move reporting towards real-time where possible, working with streaming and near-real-time pipelines.
5. Manage suppliers: the managed-service provider for front-line monitoring and the delivery partner on the Fabric and Purview platform.
6. Drive process improvement and continuous improvement: runbooks, SLAs and repeatable ways of working.
7. Embed data governance, quality and security controls, and keep the platform aligned with best-practice data architecture.
8. Reduce technical debt and retire legacy and Excel-based data sources.

Experience

1. 6+ years in data engineering or data platform operations, with recent hands-on ownership of a production platform, ideally within financial services.
2. Strong hands-on experience across the Microsoft data stack: Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL, ETL/ELT, data warehousing, data modelling and Power BI.
3. Experience of monitoring, alerting, incident management and data quality controls in a production environment.
4. Data governance experience and strong data security awareness.
5. Good data architecture knowledge, applied to keeping a platform robust and well designed.
6. Strong on process, with a track record of process improvement and continuous improvement.
7. Experience managing third-party and managed-service providers to SLA.
8. Working knowledge of DevOps or DataOps practices and automation. Exposure to Copilot, data agents or real-time data would be an advantage.

Note: typically this role will be on site at the start and hybrid after.

If interested, please send your details to Fergal Keys, Senior Partner, The Panel, at fergalk@thepanel.com