First Citizens Bank
Senior Director, Support - Data and AI Platforms
First Citizens Bank, Granite Heights, Wisconsin, United States
Senior Director, Support - Data and AI Platforms
First Citizens Bank is seeking a Senior Director, Support – Data and AI Platforms to lead global support operations for our Data Platform, AI Platform, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions.
Overview Remote role. Eligible locations: North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas.
Responsibilities include ensuring reliability, performance, and user experience for mission‑critical data and AI platforms built on AWS, Snowflake, dbt, and modern orchestration frameworks.
Success Measures
High reliability and availability for all data & AI platforms (SLA/SLO driven).
Reduction in MTTR and incident volume through automation and preventative engineering.
Strong cross‑functional trust with Engineering, Product, and Business partners.
Scalable, measurable support processes integrated across AWS, Snowflake, dbt, and AI platforms.
Well‑run, proactive, globally aligned support organization.
Strategic Leadership
Build, lead, and scale a global support organization spanning Data Engineering Support, AI Platform Support, and SRE operations.
Define the operating model, support tiers, SLAs, escalation paths, and incident lifecycle.
Define the roadmap for modernizing data support using automation, AI copilots, self‑healing pipelines, and observability modernization.
Champion reliability frameworks such as ITIL, DevOps, SRE, and FinOps for Snowflake and AWS.
Establish a culture of operational excellence, reliability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Data Platform Support
Lead the development of a scalable, resilient, and secure data platform to support real‑time and batch data processing.
Lead the batch and real‑time data movement solutions across all operational and analytical applications for the bank.
AI Platform Support (AWS)
Oversee support for enterprise AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker training, inference, pipelines, endpoints; Bedrock or custom LLM hosting; AI feature stores; model registries; vector databases; and embedding services.
Manage incident triage for model deployments, compute scaling, GPU/accelerator workloads, and data drift monitoring.
Ensure ML Ops tools (model monitoring, lineage, observability) are operational and supportable.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Lead SRE teams focused on availability, performance, and resiliency of data and AI platforms.
Coordinate infrastructure as code (Terraform) and DevOps pipelines (GitLab).
Manage observability tooling (Dynatrace).
Drive improvements in MTTR and MTTD.
Implement best practices around on‑call engineering and automated runbooks.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Management
Partner with the Enterprise Command Center and leverage enterprise capabilities for data support.
Collaborate with data engineering, AI/ML engineering, cloud & infrastructure, data product, and security teams.
Leverage the Global Capability Center in India to build the team.
Qualifications
Bachelor’s Degree with 10+ years in Information Technology (application development, support roles, and management) OR High School Diploma/GED with 14+ years in IT.
Preferred – Education and Experience
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (Master’s preferred).
12+ years of experience in data engineering, data operations, and support, with at least 5 years in a leadership capacity.
Proven experience in the financial services or banking sector, preferably in a large financial institution with strong industry‑specific data requirements.
Preferred – Technical Skills
Deep hands‑on understanding of Snowflake (performance, security, cost, monitoring), AWS architecture & services, dbt (Cloud, Core, CI/CD, model support), and an orchestration platform such as Airflow, MWAA, Astronomer, or equivalent.
Proven ability to build and lead global operations or support teams.
Strong command of incident management, observability, reliability engineering, and operational rigor.
Executive‑level communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred – Additional Skills
Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker, Bedrock, and ML Ops frameworks.
Experience with Snowflake cost governance, dbt metadata management, or platform‑level automation.
SRE/ITIL certifications or advanced AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer).
Benefits First Citizens Bank offers a competitive and thoughtfully designed benefits program. More information can be found at
https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits .
#J-18808-Ljbffr
Overview Remote role. Eligible locations: North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas.
Responsibilities include ensuring reliability, performance, and user experience for mission‑critical data and AI platforms built on AWS, Snowflake, dbt, and modern orchestration frameworks.
Success Measures
High reliability and availability for all data & AI platforms (SLA/SLO driven).
Reduction in MTTR and incident volume through automation and preventative engineering.
Strong cross‑functional trust with Engineering, Product, and Business partners.
Scalable, measurable support processes integrated across AWS, Snowflake, dbt, and AI platforms.
Well‑run, proactive, globally aligned support organization.
Strategic Leadership
Build, lead, and scale a global support organization spanning Data Engineering Support, AI Platform Support, and SRE operations.
Define the operating model, support tiers, SLAs, escalation paths, and incident lifecycle.
Define the roadmap for modernizing data support using automation, AI copilots, self‑healing pipelines, and observability modernization.
Champion reliability frameworks such as ITIL, DevOps, SRE, and FinOps for Snowflake and AWS.
Establish a culture of operational excellence, reliability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Data Platform Support
Lead the development of a scalable, resilient, and secure data platform to support real‑time and batch data processing.
Lead the batch and real‑time data movement solutions across all operational and analytical applications for the bank.
AI Platform Support (AWS)
Oversee support for enterprise AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker training, inference, pipelines, endpoints; Bedrock or custom LLM hosting; AI feature stores; model registries; vector databases; and embedding services.
Manage incident triage for model deployments, compute scaling, GPU/accelerator workloads, and data drift monitoring.
Ensure ML Ops tools (model monitoring, lineage, observability) are operational and supportable.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Lead SRE teams focused on availability, performance, and resiliency of data and AI platforms.
Coordinate infrastructure as code (Terraform) and DevOps pipelines (GitLab).
Manage observability tooling (Dynatrace).
Drive improvements in MTTR and MTTD.
Implement best practices around on‑call engineering and automated runbooks.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Management
Partner with the Enterprise Command Center and leverage enterprise capabilities for data support.
Collaborate with data engineering, AI/ML engineering, cloud & infrastructure, data product, and security teams.
Leverage the Global Capability Center in India to build the team.
Qualifications
Bachelor’s Degree with 10+ years in Information Technology (application development, support roles, and management) OR High School Diploma/GED with 14+ years in IT.
Preferred – Education and Experience
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (Master’s preferred).
12+ years of experience in data engineering, data operations, and support, with at least 5 years in a leadership capacity.
Proven experience in the financial services or banking sector, preferably in a large financial institution with strong industry‑specific data requirements.
Preferred – Technical Skills
Deep hands‑on understanding of Snowflake (performance, security, cost, monitoring), AWS architecture & services, dbt (Cloud, Core, CI/CD, model support), and an orchestration platform such as Airflow, MWAA, Astronomer, or equivalent.
Proven ability to build and lead global operations or support teams.
Strong command of incident management, observability, reliability engineering, and operational rigor.
Executive‑level communication and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred – Additional Skills
Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, including SageMaker, Bedrock, and ML Ops frameworks.
Experience with Snowflake cost governance, dbt metadata management, or platform‑level automation.
SRE/ITIL certifications or advanced AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer).
Benefits First Citizens Bank offers a competitive and thoughtfully designed benefits program. More information can be found at
https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits .
#J-18808-Ljbffr