Senior Manager - Operational Data Services

Position summary

Strategy and platform leadership

• Set the service strategy, roadmap, operating model, priorities, governance, and performance expectations.
• Advise executives on strategy, service risk, technical trade-offs, capacity, and investment decisions.
• Lead platform direction for Databricks, Azure, and SQL, including architecture, capacity, performance, availability, security, lifecycle, and cost.
• Partner with enterprise architecture, cloud, cybersecurity, database, network, and integration teams.
• Oversee platform changes, upgrades, and migrations with testing, change controls, rollback, and operational readiness.

Data delivery and operations

• Oversee delivery of data pipelines, operational data stores, integrations, and assets supporting business applications and processes.
• Promote automated testing, source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and repeatable deployment approaches.
• Own service reliability, availability, freshness, supportability, monitoring, operational thresholds, capacity planning, and maintenance.
• Maintain support models, runbooks, escalation paths, on-call coverage, dependency maps, and recovery procedures.

Incidents, risk, and governance

• Lead response to major incidents affecting data services, business systems, or guest-facing operations; coordinate recovery and communications.
• Confirm service recovery, data integrity, and downstream readiness; lead root-cause reviews and corrective actions.
• Establish and validate business continuity, high availability, disaster recovery, backup, failover, and restoration capabilities.
• Ensure security, privacy, data governance, architecture, regulatory, records-management, and audit requirements are met.
• Identify strategic, architectural, operational, cyber, data, and vendor risks; establish controls and escalation paths.

Portfolio and team leadership

• Prioritize operational commitments, strategic delivery, technical improvements, maintenance, and incident demand.
• Manage budgets, technology consumption, resource plans, vendors, managed services, and delivery partners.
• Build and lead a multidisciplinary team spanning data engineering, platform operations, integration, analysis, and production support.
• Develop team capabilities, leadership depth, succession plans, and an inclusive culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Education and experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Management, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, operational data platforms, integrations, cloud technologies, or related enterprise technology.
• Extensive experience leading teams that build and operate business-critical data platforms and services.
• Demonstrated Databricks and Azure experience in enterprise production environments.
• Strong SQL platform, data modelling, performance optimization, operational data store, and database lifecycle experience.
• Experience in service management, monitoring, support, high availability, disaster recovery, and operational readiness.
• Experience leading production incidents and complex recovery.
• Experience shaping strategy, roadmaps, governance, investment decisions, cross-functional delivery, budgets, cloud consumption, and vendor relationships.

Knowledge and skills

• Deep understanding of operational data architecture, data engineering, integration, cloud platforms, and production operations.
• Strong knowledge of Databricks, Microsoft Azure, and SQL technologies in secure, scalable enterprise environments.
• Knowledge of batch and near-real-time processing, APIs, event and message-driven integration, orchestration, and data quality controls.
• Knowledge of observability, service-level measures, incident and problem management, change management, resilience, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Strong executive communication, facilitation, negotiation, decision support, financial acumen, and people leadership.

Preferred assets

• An advanced degree and relevant certifications in Databricks, Microsoft Azure, data engineering, cloud architecture, IT service management, or related disciplines are considered assets.
• Experience in the airline, travel, or another operationally intensive and regulated industry is considered an asset.

Benefits

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

About WestJet