Senior Director, Support - Data and AI Platforms

First Citizens Bank • Raleigh, NC

28d • Remote

About The Position

The Senior Director, Support - Data and AI Platforms will lead global support operations for our Data Platform, AI Platform, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions. This role is responsible for ensuring the reliability, performance, and user experience of mission-critical data and AI platforms built on AWS, Snowflake, dbt, and modern orchestration frameworks. The Senior Director will oversee data support, production operations, incident management, and reliability engineering-building a world-class data support organization that enables high availability across the enterprise data platform, enterprise analytics, machine learning, AI and real-time data systems. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, this leader will operationalize new capabilities, drive continuous improvement, and uphold a culture of rigor and trust.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree and 10 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management. OR High School Diploma or GED and 14 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management.
• Deep hands-on understanding of Snowflake (performance, security, cost, monitoring) AWS architecture & services dbt (Cloud, Core, CI/CD, model support) Airflow/MWAA/Astronomer or equivalent orchestration
• Proven ability to build and lead global operations or support teams.
• Strong command of incident management, observability, reliability engineering, and operational rigor.
• Executive-level communication and stakeholder management skills.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (Master's degree preferred).
• 12+ years of experience in data engineering, data operations and support, with at least 5 years in a leadership capacity.
• Proven experience in the financial services or banking sector, preferably in a Large Financial Institution (LFI) with a strong understanding of industry-specific data requirements.
• Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker, Bedrock, and ML Ops frameworks.
• Experience with Snowflake cost governance, dbt metadata management, or platform-level automation.
• SRE/ITIL certifications or advanced AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer).

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and scale a global support organization spanning Data Engineering Support, AI Platform Support, and SRE Operations.
• Define the operating model, support tiers, SLAs, escalation paths, and incident lifecycle.
• Define the roadmap for modernizing data support using automation, AI copilots, self-healing pipelines, and observability modernization.
• Champion reliability frameworks such as ITIL, DevOps, SRE, and FinOps for Snowflake and AWS.
• Establish a culture of operational excellence, reliability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Lead the development of a scalable, resilient, and secure data platform to support real-time and batch data processing.
• Lead the batch and real time data movement solutions across all operational and analytical application for the bank.
• Oversee support for enterprise AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker (training, inference, pipelines, endpoints), Bedrock or custom LLM hosting, AI feature stores, model registries, vector databases, and embedding services
• Manage incident triage for model deployments, compute scaling, GPU/accelerator workloads, and data drift monitoring.
• Ensure ML Ops tools (model monitoring, lineage, observability) are operational and supportable.
• Lead SRE teams focused on: Availability, performance, and resiliency of data and AI platforms Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and DevOps Pipelines (GitLab) Observability tooling (Dynatrace)
• Drive improvements in MTTR and MTTD.
• Implement best practices around on-call engineering and automated runbooks.
• Partner with Enterprise Command Center and leverage enterprise capabilities for data support
• Collaborate with data engineering, AI/ML engineering, cloud & Infra, data product, and security teams
• Leverage the Global Capability Center (GCC) in India to build the team

Benefits

• Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Industry: Credit Intermediation and Related Activities
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees