Director, Data Platforms and Tooling

About this role

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. So, let’s get to it!     A Little About Us   Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients.

At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture.    A Little About You   You bring a unique blend of personality and professional expertise to your work, inspiring others with your passion and dedication. Your career is a testament to your diverse experiences, community involvement, and the valuable lessons you've learned along the way. You are more than just your resume; you are a reflection of your achievements, the knowledge you've gained, and the personal interests that shape who you are.

Position Overview Zelis is becoming an AI-Native company, and the Zelis Data Cloud (ZDC) is the data foundation that our analytics, AI, and agentic engineering stand on. The Director, Data Platforms & Tooling owns that foundation's engineering layer: Snowflake platform engineering and scalability, foundational tooling, CI/CD and DevOps for data, and platform governance and security — including the PHI/DLP guardrails required for healthcare data. This leader sets the reference architecture and standards that the other ZDC teams build against. This is a builder-leader role: accountable for a production-grade, secure, scalable platform — not a coordination seat.

What You’ll Do: • Snowflake platform engineering & scalability — own platform architecture, scalability, and roadmap across data-warehouse, data-lake, and Data Sharing use cases, including open table formats (Apache Iceberg on AWS S3); manage multiple Snowflake accounts (consolidation, migration, modernization); design for resilience (replication, disaster recovery / failover); ensure the platform scales with ingestion volume, AI workloads, and business demand.

• Foundational tooling, CI/CD & DevOps for data — build and own the data DevOps stack: version control, CI/CD for Snowflake / dbt objects, environment automation, infrastructure-as-code, secrets management (Vault / AWS Secrets Manager), and release discipline.

• dbt project administration & standards — own dbt project configuration, model architecture standards, test-coverage enforcement, and model-promotion workflows across environments.

• Platform governance, security & PHI/DLP guardrails — set and enforce governance, security, and data-protection standards (masking, access control, tokenization, encryption, Snowflake Horizon) across environments; partner with Security and Compliance on HIPAA / PHI.

• Reference architecture & standards — define the patterns, standards, and guardrails the other teams adopt — including medallion layering (Bronze/Silver/Gold), semantic views, and ELT/ETL patterns; act as the technical authority for platform decisions.

• Snowflake capability adoption — evaluate emerging Snowflake features (e.g., Cortex AI, Horizon, Data Sharing) and drive adoption to improve performance, scalability, security, and cost.

• Lead & grow the platform team — build and lead the platform engineering, tooling, and release-engineering function; partner closely with the Snowflake administration function on platform standards and reference architecture.

• Enable the AI layer — ready the platform for Cortex AI / Relational AI and agentic workloads (governed access to semantic / ontology layers, safe compute patterns).

• Cost & FinOps stewardship — own platform-level cost governance and consumption efficiency in partnership with Data Operations.

What You’ll Bring to Zelis: • 10+ years in data platform / data engineering, including 4+ years in engineering leadership.

• Deep Snowflake platform architecture experience at enterprise scale, including performance tuning and cost optimization.

• Strong DevOps / CI/CD / IaC background for data platforms (Terraform, dbt, schemachange, Git-based workflows).

• Proven ownership of platform governance and security, ideally including sensitive-data protection.

• Experience setting reference architecture and standards adopted across multiple teams.

• Deep experience running Snowflake on AWS (S3, storage integrations, networking) and familiarity with core AWS services and cloud cost management.

Preferred qualifications • Healthcare data experience; strong grasp of HIPAA / PHI and DLP in a cloud data platform.

• Experience preparing a platform for AI/ML and agentic (Cortex / Relational AI) workloads.

• Familiarity with OpenFlow ingestion, medallion architecture, ontology / semantic layers, and Sigma.

• Track record building durable platform teams and maturing platform capabilities. • SnowPro Advanced: Architect certification a plus.

Please note at this time we are unable to proceed with candidates who require visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Location and Workplace Flexibility Zelis is headquartered in the U.S., with multiple locations across the country and in Hyderabad, India. Check out our locations to learn more about our offices. All employee work locations are based on the needs of the position and are determined by the Leadership team. In-office work and activities vary based on work and team objectives in accordance with Company policies.

While location expectations vary by role, candidates wi

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