Senior Manager - Operational Data Services

Position summary

Strategy and platforms

• Set the function's strategy, roadmap, operating model, priorities, governance, and performance expectations.
• Advise senior leaders on strategy, service risks, technical trade-offs, capacity, and investment decisions.
• Lead platform roadmaps and standards for architecture, data ingestion, transformation, storage, access, orchestration, observability, and operational use.
• Coordinate with architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, database, network, integration, application, governance, and business teams.

Delivery and service operations

• Oversee pipelines, operational data stores, integrations, and data assets that support business applications and processes.
• Promote automated testing, source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and repeatable deployments.
• Own service reliability, availability, freshness, supportability, and performance; establish monitoring, measures, runbooks, escalation paths, and recovery procedures.
• Oversee capacity planning, performance optimization, platform administration, maintenance, and lifecycle activities.

Incident response, governance, and investment

• Lead major incident response, assess business impacts, coordinate recovery, and communicate progress and residual risks.
• Confirm recovery and data integrity, lead post-incident reviews, and address root causes and repeat incidents.
• Validate continuity, high availability, disaster recovery, backup, failover, and restoration capabilities.
• Ensure security, privacy, data governance, regulatory, records-management, and audit controls are met.
• Prioritize work and capacity, manage budgets and cloud consumption, and oversee vendors and delivery partners.

Team leadership and outcomes

• Build and develop a multidisciplinary team across data engineering, platform operations, integration, analysis, and production support.
• Set direction and performance expectations, develop leadership depth, coach team members, and foster accountability and continuous improvement.
• Success includes trusted, timely operational data; resilient services; decisive incident handling; reusable integrations; transparent service and cost reporting; and a capable team.

Education and experience

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Management, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience, is required.
• At least 10 years of progressive experience in data engineering, operational data platforms, integrations, cloud technologies, or related enterprise technology is required.
• Experience leading business-critical data platforms and teams, and enterprise production experience with Databricks and Azure, are required.
• Strong SQL, data modelling, performance optimization, operational data store, and database lifecycle experience is required.
• Experience in service management, monitoring, recovery, production incidents, strategy, cross-functional delivery, budgets, and vendor management is required.
• Advanced degrees, relevant professional certifications, and airline, travel, or other operationally intensive regulated-industry experience are assets.

Knowledge and skills

• Knowledge of operational data architecture, data engineering, integration, cloud platforms, and production operations.
• Knowledge of batch and near-real-time processing, APIs, event- and message-driven integration, orchestration, and data quality controls.
• Knowledge of observability, service measures, incident and problem management, change management, resilience, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Strong executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, decision support, financial acumen, and people leadership.

Benefits

• WestJet describes a competitive total rewards package, travel privileges for employees and family, and flexible savings and benefit programs.