Entity:
Technology
Job Family Group:
IT&S Group
Job Description:
Entity
Technology
Job Family Group
IT&S Group / Subsurface Group (confirm with Reward)
Job title
Senior Area Facing Data Manager (AFDM) – Level H
Grade / level
Level H – confirm banding with Reward prior to posting
Location
Houston, Texas, United States of America
Experience level
Intermediate to Senior
Business supported
Gulf of America (GoA) Exploration
Key interfaces
GoA Exploration leadership and subsurface community; Geophysics and Geology Domain Team leads, Pune or equivalent experience; Lead AFDMs and the Western Hemisphere AFDM team; Level I AFDMs; data management vendors
About the role
As our Area Facing Data Manager for Gulf of America (GoA) Exploration, you’ll lead the data relationship for one of bp’s most significant exploration portfolios. You’ll set the data strategy for the asset, hold the pipeline of work, and be the person the business trusts when a seismic positioning or data quality question really matters.
This is still a hands-on role – you’ll be the one who solves the problems that can’t be passed on. But it comes with real autonomy. You’ll run your portfolio without day-to-day supervision, represent Digital Data Management directly to GoA Exploration leadership, lead improvement projects that span several teams, and bring on the AFDMs coming up behind you.
What you’ll do
Partnering with the business
- Lead the data relationship for GoA Exploration – the senior point of contact, and where the hard or contested requests land.
- Set and deliver the data strategy for the asset, lined up with the business work programme, and get the people who matter behind it.
- Find where data gaps are costing the business, size the problem, and make the case for fixing it.
- Represent Digital Data Management to GoA Exploration leadership, domain leads and delivery leads, including at governance forums and planning sessions.
- Make the priority calls when demand outstrips capacity – and be able to explain and defend them. Supervise how your portfolio is performing and report the impact to Lead AFDMs.
- Develop and apply data standards, give to how we set standards across the Western Hemisphere, and own training and onboarding for the subsurface community.
- Lead project set-up, loading campaigns and data handover for exploration wells and farm-in/farm-out evaluations.
Leading seismic and well data
- Lead the health of the 2D and 3D seismic estate across Petrel, Studio and our GoA repositories – rolling your sleeves up on the sophisticated loads yourself.
- Be the technical authority on trace headers and geometry – byte locations, CDP X/Y assignment, coordinate scalars, sample intervals and trace length. You’ll take the cases' nobody else can crack, then write up the fix so it’s solved for good.
- Own CRS assurance for the portfolio, and hold the final call on whether data are correctly positioned before it goes to interpreters.
- Set the standards for survey geometries, volume realisations and depth/time settings, and review what the domain teams deliver against them.
- Assure the quality of well data across the portfolio, and handle the sophisticated or high-priority loading and remediation personally.
- Define the data quality rules, lead the defect backlog, and drive fixes to closure with data owners, domain teams and vendors.
- Lead the strategy for data volumes, storage and lifecycle – with real cost savings to show for it – and the controls that keep licensed and multi-client data in the right hands.
Gulf of America Lease Sale support
- Own data readiness end to end for the bi-annual Gulf of America Lease Sales – fixed external deadlines, high visibility, and the busiest period in our calendar.
- Lead the planning for each cycle: agree requirements with Exploration and New Ventures leadership, find the coverage gaps over blocks of interest, and secure what’s missing – including new licensing or reprocessing – well before evaluation starts.
- Build and run the delivery plan over nominated blocks, and own the call on positioning accuracy and licence entitlement for everything the evaluation team uses.
- Negotiate the extra capacity you need from the Pune teams and vendors, and raise resourcing risk early rather than absorbing it quietly.
- Lead handover on the blocks we win, and run a proper lessons-learned so the next cycle goes better.
Working with our domain teams in Pune
- Build strong working relationships with the domain leads in Pune – this partnership is one of the things that makes or breaks the role.
- Lead the demand pipeline and how work is triaged, setting the definition of ready and definition of done standards for the portfolio and coaching others to meet them.
- Delegate to the domain guides, step in when delivery or quality slips, and have the honest conversations with domain leads when standards aren’t being met.
- Decide where routine work ends and project work begins, shape the service catalogue, and bring resourcing decisions to your manager with a clear recommendation.
- Drive improvements to how we triage and hand over work across the Western Hemisphere AFDM team, and set the tone in dataOps stand-ups and retrospectives.
Improvement projects and doing things properly
- Lead data improvement projects – quality remediation, legacy data rescue, repository consolidation, metadata enrichment, storage reduction – from case through to benefits, including work spanning several teams and delivery partners.
- Own planning and tracking in Azure DevOps, and build the boards, queries and dashboards that give people a view they can rely on.
- Present delivery updates to your manager, Lead AFDMs and business interested parties – including the risks and resourcing calls, with a recommendation attached.
- Make sure we stay on the right side of bp’s data management, records, export control and offshore regulatory requirements, and write up the workflows and procedures that make good practice stick.
- Champion automation and AI where it genuinely reduces repetitive work and improves quality at source – and share what you build with the wider team.
- Handle what our vendors deliver: agree scope, review the technical work, accept results and feed into performance discussions.
Leading technically and bringing others on
- Guide and mentor Level I AFDMs, reviewing their work where the risk or complexity explains it and helping them grow.
- Be the person people come to on seismic data management, geodesy and CRS – and build the wider team’s capability through knowledge sharing and good documentation.
- Step in for Lead AFDMs or your manager in agreed forums when needed.
Education
- A degree or equivalent experience in Geoscience, Geophysics, Geology, Earth Science, Information Management, Computer Science or a related technical subject – that shows you can do the job.
What you’ll bring
- Substantial experience in subsurface, seismic or geoscience data management.
- Sophisticated hands-on Petrel skills, including project set-up and administration and the Petrel–Studio transfer workflow – enough to diagnose the problems other people bring up.
- Deep SEG-Y expertise – non-standard byte locations, awkward geometry, and validating positioning on datasets with poor or missing documentation.
- Validated understanding of coordinate reference systems, projections, datums and unit conversions for offshore seismic data – enough that colleagues come to you to check their thinking.
- Broad command of exploration data types and how geoscientists actually use them in interpretation and evaluation.
- The communication skills to influence senior interested parties.
- Experience advising work through teams in other locations – setting priorities, reviewing quality and giving honest feedback across time zones.
- A track record of leading projects end to end, accountable for the outcome rather than just the tasks.
- Shown understanding of Azure DevOps, or something similar like Jira.
- Experience mentoring or technically reviewing the work of less authoritative colleagues.
Nice to have
- Direct Gulf of America or deepwater exploration experience, ideally including a licence round or lease sale cycle.
- Working experience of Studio Manager, Blueback Project Tracker or similar project and data governance tools.
- Awareness of industry data standards such as PPDM, Energistics, OSDU or SEG.
- Experience with other interpretation or data platforms – Kingdom, OpenWorks, Geoframe or SeisWare, for example.
- Confidence with AI tools – knowing where generative AI genuinely helps with data work, and where it shouldn’t be used.
- Data quality or improvement work you can point to, with measurable results.
- Some scripting – Python, PowerShell or equivalent – for data QC, migration or reporting.
- Awareness of BOEM/BSEE data submission and reporting requirements.
Practical things to know
- This role is based in Houston, Texas, working a hybrid mix of office and home in line with our Houston site agreement. Being on site regularly matters here – close contact with the exploration community and its leadership is much of the job.
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