Data Platform and Management Manager

Description for Internal Candidates

Role Purpose

To set strategic actions for activating and operating the company’s analytics data platform and data management functions in order to ensure the delivery of a robust, scalable, and secure analytics data infrastructure while achieving compliance with data management regulations and best practices within the set KPIs, agreed budgets, and adopted policies and procedures.

Responsibilities for Internal Candidates

Key Accountability Areas

Key Activities

Strategic Leadership

• Support data management director in the development of vision, goals, and roadmap for the data management and Analytics data platform departments.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within managed teams.
• Ensure effective resource allocation, workload balancing, and prioritization across teams to derive the directorate strategic agenda
• Act as a bridge between technical teams and business stakeholders to ensure data platform and data management strategic initiatives deliver measurable business value in reference to organizational goal.
• Provide strategic oversight and governance for the end-to-end management of the PMO office established to implement Saudi government data management regulations (e.g., SDAIA, NDMO, NCA) across the enterprise.
• Steer the implementation of Saudi government data regulations and controls across all data management and governance domains, ensuring adherence to SDAIA, NDMO, and NCA standards.
• Stay abreast of evolving data regulations and ensure the organization’s data management practices remain compliant and future-ready.
• Oversee the discovery and back-end requirements planning processes for analytics use-cases that can be supported using the data platform
• Lead the development of strategic initiatives and roadmaps for the continuous improvement of the enterprise data management domain, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.

Planning & Strategy

• Contribute to the design and implementation of the department’s strategy and roadmap by providing function-specific inputs
• Establish and implement the function’s operational plans in support of the department’s overall strategic plan and KPIs

Budget

• Participate in Department annual budgeting cycle and process
• Contribute to utilizing Department’s budget effectively, and report accurately on progress made and challenges encountered
• Investigate and propose implementing strategies that result in positive financial impact for SANS and mitigate financial and operational risks

Operational Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop a range of engineering roles including Data engineers, Analytics solutions software developers, Analytics solutions architects, infrastructure and network engineers and data management operations specialists.
• Ensure department on-the-job training, mentoring and coaching programs are executed successfully
• Provide direction, prioritize tasks, assign and delegate responsibility and monitor the workflow with assigned sections team leads.
• Promote a high-performance working environment embracing SANS’s values
• Ensure regular performance reviews and coaching is provided to development team leads and teams members.
• Ensure training programs is facilitated with HR directorate and external parties to elevate department employees competencies and skills.
• Work with supervisors to define career ladders for all managed engineering roles under the data platform and data management teams, ensuring clarity on expectations and growth opportunities
• Compile and share department productivity reports and projects pipeline state to director and c-suite stakeholders.
• Recruit, onboard, and retain top talent for the department.
• Address conflicts or performance issues promptly and constructively, ensuring a positive and productive work environment
• Prioritize the needs of the team, removing obstacles and providing the support they need to succeed

C-Suite Communication

• Generate and present regular reports on data platform and data management initiatives to senior leadership.
• Build strong relationships with cross-functional operational managers to ensure alignment and collaboration on strategic data platform and data management initiatives.
• Educate managerial stakeholders on data platform and data management stack best practices and utility.
• Advocate for the value of analytics and data management solutions and secure buy-in for new initiatives and investments.
• Manage leadership expectations and ensure timely delivery of data platform and data management projects.

Bespoke Analytics solutions development management

• Provide guidance to Analytics solutions developers team leads to deliver high quality data products that adheres to best practices.
• Champion the development and implementation of software development frameworks and operating model modules and planning interfaces.
• Work with c-suite and executives to identify strategic data products needs.
• Regularly engage with leadership and managerial stakeholders to gather feedback and validate that deployed analytics solutions meet their needs
• Monitor value metrics encompassing the full cycle of envisaged and developed Analytics solutions.
• Conduct regular team health checks or surveys to identify areas for improvement in team dynamics and morale
• Continuously identify strategic opportunities for analytics solutions where value can be added to the operational business domain.
• Work with reporting sections team leads to ensure analytics solutions are scalable, reliable, and aligned with business needs.
• Develop strategy and roadmap for analytics solutions custom software while ensuring that defined path is consistent with the enterprise and directorate vision.

Engineering management

• Oversee the implementation of agile methodologies and project management frameworks to streamline reporting team operations and improve delivery timelines.
• Provide strategic direction for the Data platform’s architecture, ensuring it is scalable, secure, cost-effective, and compliant with governance standards
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture leaders to align engineering efforts with broader enterprise technology strategies.
• Guide the development of the enterprise data management technology stack
• Conduct regular system reviews to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement in the data platform and analytics solutions architecture
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices, including DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, version control, code reviews, and testing protocols, across data platform engineering and development teams.
• Monitor project progress, identify risks, and implement mitigation strategies to ensure on-time and high-quality delivery of analytics projects.
• Develop and execute a strategy to manage technical debt, prioritizing refactoring, documentation, and process improvements across data platform engineering and development teams.

Innovation and continuous improvement

• Stay informed about emerging technologies, tools, and methodologies in data engineering and management.
• Support Piloting and implement new tools and techniques to enhance team productivity and solution quality.
• Encourage experimentation and innovation within the teams to solve business challenges creatively.
• Benchmark analytics practices against industry standards and implement improvements as needed.
• Promote knowledge sharing and cross-team collaboration to foster a learning environment.
• Organize regular knowledge-sharing sessions, hackathons, or innovation days to encourage creativity and skill development.
• Provide access to training, conferences, and certifications to help team members stay ahead of industry trends

Policies, Processes and Procedures

• Propose improvements to Department’s policies, and ensure the implementation of procedures and controls across all areas of activity so that all relevant procedural/legislative requirements are fulfilled while delivering high quality and cost-effective results
• Monitor day-to-day activities to ensure compliance with stipulated policies and procedures
• Stimulate subordinates and contribute to the identification of opportunities for continuous improvement of systems and processes taking into account leading practices, changes in business environment, cost reduction and productivity improvement

People Management

• Manage, guide and assist direct reports to perform their functional operations in accordance with set policies and procedures
• Participate in identifying and recruiting key talent for Department
• Promote a high-performance working environment embracing SANS’s values

Qualifications for Internal Candidates

Knowledge and Experience

• Minimum 9 years of experience in a similar technology role, with at least 4 years of experience in a managerial position.

Desirable:

• Referenced hands-on experience: team lead or unit manager/supervisor managing people in a technology or data engineering context or Data platform implementation projects or operations.
• hands on experience with popular SaaS services for database, developer and analytics (GCP, AWS or Azure), and task management tools (JIRA, Microsoft Azure DevOPS boards).
• Strong grasp on DevOps CICD, version controlling, Git, observability and telemetry practices, tooling and concepts, and Agile frameworks, and data modeling, warehousing, big data technologies, and cloud computing.
• Practical exposure to the following distributed storage systems: HDFS, HBase, Apache Ozone, APACHE SOLR.

Education and Certifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer science, Cybersecurity, Information Technology or equivalent is required.