Lead Platform Engineer

The J.M. Smucker Co.•Orrville, OH

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Lead Platform Engineer serves as the technical authority responsible for defining the administration, governance, and operational excellence of the Enterprise Data Platform. This role drives platform standardization, performance, governance, and usability, ensuring that analytics, data science, and data engineering teams can efficiently build, access, and trust data products. The role is accountable for end-to-end platform health, including Tableau Cloud administration, Databricks platform configuration, Atlan configuration and overall ecosystem reliability. It establishes the technical foundation that supports scalable analytics, models, reporting, and data engineering workloads across the enterprise.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
5+ years of experience in platform engineering, analytics platform administration, or data platform roles
Strong experience supporting enterprise-scale Tableau and analytics environments
Proven ability to define platform standards and drive adoption at scale
Experience supporting modern data platforms and cloud-based analytics ecosystems
Experience operating within data transformation or modernization initiatives
Demonstrated success leading complex cross-functional initiatives involving Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, Governance, Data Engineering, and Analytics teams
Deep expertise in Databricks, Tableau or related administration and optimization
Strong experience with Databricks administration, platform configuration and operations
Advanced understanding of analytics platform design and data access patterns
Experience implementing monitoring, observability, and performance tuning solutions
Strong knowledge of data governance, security, and access control frameworks
Python, Terraform, SQL

Nice To Haves

Audit and compliance controls
Catalog and governance tools such as Atlan
Medallion architecture and data modeling concepts
Cloud platforms like AWS
Data ingestion platforms such as Fivetran
CI/CD, automation, and deployment practices
Cloud platform concepts and data storage architectures
Analytics Platform support with current and future AI capabilities

Responsibilities

Define, implement, and govern platform administration, standards, architectural patterns, and operational guardrails across Tableau Cloud, Databricks, Atlan, and related analytics technologies.
Establish scalable and secure platform architectures, including environment strategy, permissions models, workspace design, content promotion, job orchestration, and compute governance.
Standardize deployment, configuration, and operational processes to improve consistency, reliability, and maintainability across the analytics ecosystem.
Drive adoption of platform best practices through collaboration with engineering, architecture, security, and business teams while ensuring alignment with enterprise governance and data management policies.
Lead Databricks database administration practices, including Unity Catalog governance, schema and metadata management, performance optimization, storage lifecycle management, data retention, and access control standards.
Define how platform capabilities are used to support scalable analytics and data pipelines.
Establish standards for job execution and scheduling.
Ensure platform supports medallion architecture patterns and modern ingestion approaches.
Own the monitoring, observability, and operational health strategy for Tableau Cloud, Databricks, Atlan, and related analytics platforms.
Establish proactive health checks, alerting frameworks, and performance monitoring capabilities to ensure platform reliability, availability, and service quality.
Drive continuous optimization of platform performance by identifying and resolving issues affecting dashboards, data pipelines, compute resources, and end-user experience.
Define, monitor, and communicate platform SLAs, KPIs, and operational metrics while leading vendor engagement and escalation management to support service excellence.
Define, design and implement DevOps standards, deployment processes, and release management practices across Tableau Cloud, Databricks, Atlan, and supporting platform technologies.
Design, implement, and continuously improve CI/CD processes that enable secure, reliable, and repeatable deployment of platform configurations, analytics assets, and data products.
Establish Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) standards to improve consistency, scalability, auditability, and operational efficiency across environments.
Drive automation of platform provisioning, configuration management, access controls, monitoring, and operational processes to reduce manual administration and improve service quality.
Design and implement platform cost management standards, ensuring efficient utilization of compute, storage, licensing, and infrastructure resources.
Monitor platform consumption and performance metrics to identify optimization opportunities and drive cost-effective, scalable platform operations.
Own platform operations, incident management, escalations, and root cause analysis, driving corrective actions that improve platform reliability and service quality.
Lead platform releases, upgrades, change management, and deployment governance, including testing, validation, communication, and rollback planning.
Partner with Risk, Security, and Governance teams to ensure audit readiness, disaster recovery, business continuity, and adherence to enterprise compliance requirements.
Manage strategic vendor relationships and partnership activities, collaborating with platform owners and technology leaders to evaluate vendor roadmaps, influence product direction, and drive adoption of capabilities that deliver measurable business value.
Assess platform investments, vendor offerings, and emerging technologies to ensure platform capabilities, contracts, and roadmaps align with organizational objectives and long-term platform strategy.