Director, Data Platforms and Tooling

Zelis • Morristown, TN

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. Zelis is becoming an AI-Native company, and the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) is the data foundation that our analytics, AI, and agentic engineering stand on. The Director, Data Platforms & Tooling owns that foundation's engineering layer: Snowflake platform engineering and scalability, foundational tooling, CI/CD and DevOps for data, and platform governance and security — including the PHI/DLP guardrails required for healthcare data. This leader sets the reference architecture and standards that the other ZDC teams build against. This is a builder-leader role: accountable for a production-grade, secure, scalable platform — not a coordination seat.

Requirements

• 10+ years in data platform / data engineering, including 4+ years in engineering leadership.
• Deep Snowflake platform architecture experience at enterprise scale, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
• Strong DevOps / CI/CD / IaC background for data platforms (Terraform, dbt, schemachange, Git-based workflows).
• Proven ownership of platform governance and security, ideally including sensitive-data protection.
• Experience setting reference architecture and standards adopted across multiple teams.
• Deep experience running Snowflake on AWS (S3, storage integrations, networking) and familiarity with core AWS services and cloud cost management.

Nice To Haves

• Healthcare data experience; strong grasp of HIPAA / PHI and DLP in a cloud data platform.
• Experience preparing a platform for AI/ML and agentic (Cortex / Relational AI) workloads.
• Familiarity with OpenFlow ingestion, medallion architecture, ontology / semantic layers, and Sigma.
• Track record building durable platform teams and maturing platform capabilities.
• SnowPro Advanced: Architect certification a plus.

Responsibilities

• Snowflake platform engineering & scalability — own platform architecture, scalability, and roadmap across data-warehouse, data-lake, and Data Sharing use cases, including open table formats (Apache Iceberg on AWS S3); manage multiple Snowflake accounts (consolidation, migration, modernization); design for resilience (replication, disaster recovery / failover); ensure the platform scales with ingestion volume, AI workloads, and business demand.
• Foundational tooling, CI/CD & DevOps for data — build and own the data DevOps stack: version control, CI/CD for Snowflake / dbt objects, environment automation, infrastructure-as-code, secrets management (Vault / AWS Secrets Manager), and release discipline.
• dbt project administration & standards — own dbt project configuration, model architecture standards, test-coverage enforcement, and model-promotion workflows across environments.
• Platform governance, security & PHI/DLP guardrails — set and enforce governance, security, and data-protection standards (masking, access control, tokenization, encryption, Snowflake Horizon) across environments; partner with Security and Compliance on HIPAA / PHI.
• Reference architecture & standards — define the patterns, standards, and guardrails the other teams adopt — including medallion layering (Bronze/Silver/Gold), semantic views, and ELT/ETL patterns; act as the technical authority for platform decisions.
• Snowflake capability adoption — evaluate emerging Snowflake features (e.g., Cortex AI, Horizon, Data Sharing) and drive adoption to improve performance, scalability, security, and cost.
• Lead & grow the platform team — build and lead the platform engineering, tooling, and release-engineering function; partner closely with the Snowflake administration function on platform standards and reference architecture.
• Enable the AI layer — ready the platform for Cortex AI / Relational AI and agentic workloads (governed access to semantic / ontology layers, safe compute patterns).
• Cost & FinOps stewardship — own platform-level cost governance and consumption efficiency in partnership with Data Operations.

Benefits

• 401k plan with employer match
• flexible paid time off
• holidays
• parental leaves
• life and disability insurance
• health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed