Director, Platform Engineering and Operations

When you join Verizon

Verizon is a leading provider of technology, communications, information and entertainment products, transforming the way we connect across the globe. We’re a diverse network of people driven by our ambition and united in our shared purpose to shape a better future. Here, we have the ability to learn and grow at the speed of technology, and the space to create within every role. Together, we are moving the world forward – and you can too. Dream it. Build it. Do it here.

What you’ll be doing...

This is a leadership role that will require team leadership skills and technical expertise in designing, deploying and scaling data & AI platforms at a large enterprise, preferably at a Fortune 50 company or at a technology that has successfully scaled to a billion plus in annual revenue over the past decade.

Reporting to the Head of the AI Industrialization, this individual will play a leadership role in building and developing a team of highly skilled Platform Engineers. The Director will lead a team of 40-50 platform engineers focused on building scalable data management platform starting from data ingestion to all the way to consumption. This leader will drive our team, talent, and best practices. This truly bring the capability for data engineers, data scientists, data analyst and business partners to build AI products rapidly. These will need to be implemented on premise, cloud and hybrid mode to meet the needs of business and engineers.

At Verizon, we are on a multi-year journey to industrialize our data practices and AI capabilities. Very simply, this means that AI and data will fuel all decisions and business processes across the company. To achieve these capabilities, we need to have scalable data platforms which provide frictionless experience to our internal engineering, data scientists and business partners. At $130B+ in annual revenue, this is a pioneering opportunity to build the data products and talent at a top global telco organization. With our leadership in bringing 5G network nationwide, the opportunity for AI and Data will only grow exponentially in going from enabling new revenue opportunities and exquisite customer experience through real-time data insights. Therefore, it will be critical that this candidate possess previous experience with leading large engineering teams and AI efforts, attracting and retaining top talent, and building a team and culture that promotes curiosity and collaborations with a strong commitment to creating value for Verizon’s customers, employees, stakeholders and the society.

An ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills, critical thinking, and strategic thinking skills above and beyond the technical knowledge and leadership skills required for this position.

Responsibilities

Build and Manage the Team;

• Build a high performing team of platform engineers that is highly engaged, operates with high degree to autonomy, accountability and a sense to urgency in delivering on business outcomes

• Build a diverse team with an inclusive culture

• Attract and retain top platform and performance engineering

• Enable career development via access to training resources, on the job coaching and mentoring

Deliver Business Outcomes;

• Align with business partners to enable your team to design, develop, and deploy large-scale data applications in a production environment.

• A successful team will be able to innovate, experiment and bring relevant learnings back into the organization and embed into ways of working.

Influence Business Partners;

• Operate as an expert both within Verizon and externally within industry

• Serve as a technical thought leader and advisor to the organization

• Serve as trusted advisor to our business partners

• Shape and communicate a clear vision, strategy and roadmap to all stakeholders

Elevate the Platform Engineering Practices;

• Lead the team of Platform Engineers to design and build scalable data platforms including object store, HDFS, HBase, Presto, Teradata etc.

• Work with Data Architecture and the data engineering teams to define, design and implement production workloads in on-perm as well cloud platforms like GCP.

• Stay informed on the latest advancements in AI and technology space, finding new ways to deliver value by creating new solutions through platforms and tools

• Understand the current landscape across all LOBs and incorporate existing assets

• Support the Instrumentation team to build BI Tools, Visualization platforms and ML engineering environments to create more value out every asset available in the company.

• Support Platform Strategy Lead in developing and maintaining a perspective on how data could be leveraged across the Verizon ecosystem, and serve as an promoter as appropriate

• Inspire our team to create monetizable Data and AI platforms that can be leveraged both within Verizon and externally with Verizon’s partners.

What we’re looking for...

• 7+ years in leading data platform engineering teams with a proven successful track record

• 7+ years in product/project management with business enablement experience a must

• 7+ years in business or function working on platform and supportissues

• Experience with big data and streaming data approaches in large data scale organizations

• Experience in managing BI platforms like ThoughtSpot, Looker and Qlik

• Experience with messaging and streaming (Kafka, Dataflow and Dataproc ).

• Familiarity with data governance and lineage systems like CP4D and Collabera.

• Big data and data lake experience (GCP, BQ, Hadoop, Spark).

• Experience with Dominos data lab, DataRobot, CP4D and BQ ML will be added plus

• MS or BSin Computer Science, Information Science, Engineering or others related field

• Strong leadership experience in a business or function role managing teams

• Strong project management experience

• Strong ability to apply business mindset to platform operations

• Ability to integrate cross-business strategies and manage enterprise-wide resources

• Strong communication and influencing skills

Equal Employment Opportunity

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer - and celebrate our employees' differences, including race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, and Veteran status. At Verizon, we know that diversity makes us stronger. We are committed to a collaborative, inclusive environment that encourages authenticity and fosters a sense of belonging. We strive for everyone to feel valued, connected, and empowered to reach their potential and contribute their best.Check out our diversity and inclusion page to learn more.