Director, Data Platforms and Tooling

Zelis • Boston, MA

3d • $169,000 - $213,750 • Hybrid

About The Position

Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients. At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture. 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: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed