Workiva, Inc

Data Operations Senior Lead

Workiva, Inc$151K — $242K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or relevant field
  • 6+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Systems Engineering roles
  • Proven ability to lead and direct technical projects or teams
  • Deep understanding of data modeling and warehousing
  • Hands-on experience with Snowflake and DBT, expert in Snowflake SQL
  • Expert-level experience with Terraform, Splunk, and Airflow
  • High proficiency in Python and languages like Java, Go, or Scala
  • Experience with ingestion frameworks like Fivetran and CData

Responsibilities

  • Provide technical direction and guidance to the offshore team
  • Own operational health and performance of the data platform
  • Lead and drive incident management for production issues
  • Design monitoring frameworks for efficient SOA governance
  • Build self-service workflows and automate administrative tasks
  • Manage orchestration of data tasks with tools like Airflow
  • Ensure effective access control and compliance with regulations

Benefits

  • Discretionary annual bonus
  • Restricted Stock Units at hire
  • 401(k) match
  • Comprehensive employee benefits package
  • Remote work flexibility with reliable internet access
Full Job Description
We are looking for a Data Operations Lead to ensure the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our analytics and data systems. This role is operationally critical and technically demanding. As a senior technical leader, you will be responsible for keeping our data platforms available and performant, providing technical direction and guidance to an offshore contract team, and enabling our data engineering teams to move fast with confidence. You will be a key driver of technical strategy and execution without direct people management responsibilities. If you are energized by solving complex data problems at scale and want your work to have a direct impact every day, join us on this transformative journey.

What You'll Do

Operational Excellence and Reliability
  • Technical Leadership & Direction:Provide expert technical guidance and direction to an offshore contract team to ensure high-quality execution of platform operations, automation, and reliability projects. Act as the primary technical point of contact and decision-maker for the team
  • Reliability & Operations:Own the operational health and performance of the data platform. Define and implement reliability goals (SLIs/SLOs) and establish sustainable mechanisms for scaling systems through automation
  • Incident Management:Lead and drive incident response and management for platform-related production issues. Conduct blameless post-mortems and drive systemic enhancements in reliability and efficiency based on findings
  • Observability & Monitoring: Design and implement monitoring frameworks to govern service-oriented architecture (SOA) efficiently and intelligently. Establish alerting for system health, query behavior, and performance bottlenecks


Procession and Automation (The "Ops" in DataOps)
  • Automation & Platform Engineering:Reduce operational toil by building self-service workflows, "guardrails," and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solutions. Automate administration tasks, environment provisioning, and usage monitoring, leveraging and mentoring the offshore team to execute
  • Orchestration:Managing the "traffic control" of data tasks (using tools like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect) to ensure complex dependencies are handled efficiently


Data Governance and Security
  • Access Control:Ensuring the right people have access to the right data (RBAC - Role-Based Access Control) without slowing down the business
  • Data Quality Frameworks:Building automated "circuit breakers" that stop data from reaching the warehouse if it doesn't meet quality standards (e.g., missing values or incorrect formatting)
  • Compliance:Partnering with Legal/Security teams to ensure data handling meets GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific regulations (HIPAA, SOX)


Strategic Stakeholder Management
  • Capacity Planning: Managing the cloud budget (Snowflake/BigQuery/Databricks costs) and predicting how much compute power the company will need as data volume grows
  • Business Alignment: Translating technical constraints into business impact. If a project is delayed, they explain why in terms of risk and data integrity rather than just "the code broke"
  • Operational Support: Consult with and provide expert operational support to data engineering, product teams, and stakeholders who utilize the Data Platform. This is critical to ensuring the performance and reliability of downstream data products


What You'll Need

Minimum Qualifications
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
  • Experience:6+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Systems Engineering roles, with a deep focus on data infrastructure, including experience leading technical projects or teams
  • Technical Direction:Proven ability to provide clear technical leadership, direction, and oversight to cross-functional or geographically distributed engineering teams (e.g., contract or offshore teams)
  • Data Expertise:Deep understanding of data modeling, warehousing, and building scalable ETL/ELT pipelines
  • Data Warehouse:Hands-on experience with Snowflake and DBT a must. Expert in Snowflake SQL.
  • Monitoring and Automation: Expert-level hands-on experience with Terraform, Splunk, and Airflow or similar technologies required
  • Programming:High proficiency in Python and programming languages such as Java, Go, or Scala
  • Ingestion Frameworks: Management of ingestion frameworks like Fivetran, CData, Census and Openflow
  • Data Lakes: Experience with S3, Athena and Iceberg required


Preferred Qualifications
  • Infrastructure:Extensive experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud-managed services (AWS preferred)
  • Systems Knowledge:Familiarity with Unix/Linux system internals, networking, and distributed systems
  • Scale:Experience in designing, analyzing, and operating large-scale distributed systems and massive data warehouses
  • SRE Maturity:Strong background in cost optimization, usage governance, and maturing SRE practices within a data ecosystem

Working Conditions & Travel Requirements
  • Minimal (
  • Reliable internet access for remote working opportunities


How You'll Be Rewarded
• Salary range in the US: $151,000.00 - $242,000.00
• A discretionary bonus typically paid annually
• Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire
• 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

The salary range represents the low and high end of the salary range for this job in the US. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. The actual salary offer will carefully consider a wide range of factors, including your skills, qualifications, experience and other relevant factors.

Working Conditions & Travel Requirements
  • Minimal (
  • Reliable internet access for remote working opportunities


How You'll Be Rewarded
• Salary range in the US: $151,000.00 - $242,000.00
• A discretionary bonus typically paid annually
• Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire
• 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

About Workiva, Inc

Workiva Inc. is a global software company headquartered in Ames, Iowa. The company provides cloud-based solutions for connected reporting and compliance, enabling collaboration and data integration for enterprises. Workiva's platform offers a suite of tools for data management, reporting, and compliance, including SOX, SEC, and XBRL reporting. The company's customers include more than 75% of the Fortune 500 and over 2,800 enterprises worldwide. Workiva was founded in 2008 and went public in 2014.
Learn more about Workiva, Inc
Size
2,106 employees
Market Cap
$4.3 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$48.4 million
Founded
2008
5 Year Trend
+19.9%
Revenue
$351.5 million
NASDAQ

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