Director, ZDC Operations

Zelis • St. Louis, MO

47d • $153,000 - $193,800 • 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.
You bring a unique blend of personality and professional expertise to your work, inspiring others with your passion and dedication. Your career is a testament to your diverse experiences, community involvement, and the valuable lessons you've learned along the way. You are more than just your resume; you are a reflection of your achievements, the knowledge you've gained, and the personal interests that shape who you are.
Zelis is becoming an AI-Native company, and the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) is the data foundation that our analytics, AI, and agentic engineering are built on. The Director, ZDC Operations owns the run-state of that foundation: the reliability, monitoring, and operational quality of every production data pipeline across the Snowflake platform.
This leader establishes a best-in-class data operations function on a Center of Excellence (CoE) model — driving efficiencies and economies of scale, reliability, reusability, and repeatability while reducing duplication of technology and process and enabling automation. The role builds and runs the DataOps / Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) practice and assist in moving L1 to Global Operations Center (GOC) so that data products, dashboards, and downstream AI workloads run predictably and within SLA.
This is a hands-on leadership role — accountable for operational outcomes, not just coordination — leading a distributed onshore/offshore team across L1/L2/L3 support tiers

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field — or equivalent experience; Master's preferred.
• 10+ years in data engineering / data operations, including 4+ years leading teams (ideally distributed onshore/offshore).
• Deep operational experience running Snowflake (on AWS) in production at scale.
• Strong orchestration background (Airflow, dbt, Snowflake Tasks/Streams, or equivalent) and modern DataOps / SRE practices — monitoring, alerting, incident management, on-call.
• Solid foundation in data warehousing, data modeling, and BI & analytics concepts.
• Track record standing up reliability practices (SLAs/SLOs, runbooks, postmortems) and measurably improving pipeline reliability.
• Working knowledge of Agile / Scrum and operational tracking with Jira / Confluence.
• Excellent incident-command and stakeholder-communication skills under pressure.

Nice To Haves

• Experience establishing an operations Center of Excellence and a distributed onshore/offshore, L1/L2/L3 support model.
• Experience with a data-observability platform (e.g., Pantomath, Monte Carlo, or similar).
• Familiarity with data-quality / testing frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations, Soda) and data-contract practices.
• Experience driving automation (including RPA) across data operations.
• Healthcare data experience and working knowledge of HIPAA / PHI handling and controls.
• Familiarity with medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), dbt, and OpenFlow-style ingestion.
• Exposure to ModelOps / MLOps for production AI/ML workloads.

Responsibilities

• Establish a data operations CoE with a distributed onshore/offshore, tiered (L1/L2/L3) support structure; drive efficiencies and economies of scale, reduce duplication of tooling and process, and enable automation (including RPA) across the data lifecycle.
• Own end-to-end run-state health for all ZDC data pipelines; define, measure, and hold to data SLAs/SLOs and reliability KPIs (freshness SLO attainment, MTTD, MTTR, change-failure rate).
• Manage job orchestration, scheduling, dependency management, and recovery; drive down failed-run rates and mean-time-to-recovery.
• Implement operational data-quality checks and testing frameworks (dbt tests, Great Expectations / Soda), data contracts and schema-change management, freshness/latency monitoring, anomaly detection, and a disciplined incident-triage and root-cause process.
• Build and lead the Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) function, including hiring, mentoring, and setting standards for a DRE practice that applies SRE discipline (error budgets, runbooks, blameless postmortems) to data.
• Own the on-call rotation, escalation, and incident-management tooling (PagerDuty / Jira); coordinate Snowflake / DBA support for run-state issues.
• Build the runbooks, monitoring dashboards, alerting, and escalation paths that enable the Global Operations Center (GOC) to take on L1 support for ZDC around the clock.
• Deploy and operate the team's data-observability tooling for pipeline lineage, freshness, and incident detection.
• Lead the Snowflake administration function, ensuring platform administration, RBAC, and PHI/DLP guardrails are maintained day-to-day; partner with the Data Platforms & Tooling team on standards and reference architecture.
• Provide visibility into operational health through operational dashboards and KPIs; establish process and documentation templates and drive adherence; track and report work through Jira / Confluence.
• Partner with Data Platforms & Tooling on CI/CD and environment stability, and with Data Enablement on clean pipeline handoffs from build to run.
• Steward Snowflake compute / warehouse consumption from an operational-reliability lens; ensure adherence to Zelis privacy and data-handling standards.

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