Data Reliability Manager

About the role

The Data Governance Manager manages a team of data governance professionals and oversees the implementation of BT's data governance strategy, driving adherence to related policy and standards, whilst ensuring data remains accurate, consistent, secure, and aligned with strategic objectives.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead, coach and develop the Data Reliability Engineering team, setting clear priorities, standards and measurable outcomes.
• Own the reliability requirements for enterprise data pipelines and data products, covering availability, freshness, completeness, performance and recoverability.
• Define and maintain service-level indicators, service-level objectives, alert thresholds, runbooks and operational ownership for critical data services.
• Ensure monitoring, telemetry and automated checks are built into new and migrated data pipelines before live-service acceptance.
• Own the Data Reliability Engineering contribution to service acceptance, challenging handover where monitoring, recovery evidence or accountable ownership is missing.
• Lead the technical response and recovery for significant data-pipeline and data-product incidents, working with SRE, engineering and Service Operations.
• Drive clear root-cause analysis and ensure recurring failures result in structural engineering fixes rather than repeated manual intervention.
• Build and maintain a prioritised reliability backlog, with agreed owners, target dates and evidence of risk reduction.
• Use Cephalopod, Dynatrace and platform-native tooling to improve automated monitoring, control evidence and operational response.
• Identify reliability risks, capacity constraints and manual operational work that can be removed through automation or design change.
• Work with Data Ingestion and Core Engineering to improve pipeline design, orchestration, data-quality controls, deployment patterns and recovery capability.
• Provide clear reporting on data-service health, incidents, recovery performance, recurring failure patterns and improvement progress.
• Support a sustainable operational model, including agreed support coverage, escalation paths and participation in incident or on-call arrangements where required.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Experience leading data engineering, data reliability, platform operations or production-support teams in a complex organisation.
• Strong understanding of batch and streaming data pipelines, orchestration, data quality, lineage, monitoring and recovery.
• Experience defining service-level indicators, service-level objectives, alerts, runbooks and operational acceptance criteria.
• Strong incident, problem and root-cause management experience, including leading technical recovery across teams.
• Experience using monitoring and operational evidence to prioritise engineering improvements and prevent repeat failure.
• Ability to lead and develop engineers, set clear standards and hold teams accountable for outcomes.
• Strong stakeholder management across data engineering, platform engineering, SRE, service operations and business teams.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including concise reporting of service risk and performance to senior stakeholders.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform data services such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Dataplex and Cloud Composer.
• Experience with Dynatrace, Google Cloud Monitoring, Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent observability tooling.
• Knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering practices, including error budgets, operational toil reduction and blameless learning.
• Experience with data-observability platforms, automated data-quality controls and infrastructure as code.
• Relevant certification in Google Cloud, data engineering, SRE, DevOps or IT service management.