Senior Technology Manager

Essential Responsibilities:

• Partner with stakeholders across various business units and other Data & Analytics leaders to influence strategic plans and roadmaps.Identify new opportunities for Data & Analytics solutions by cultivating relationships with leaders across the organization and foster those partnerships. Focus on Experience and Efficiency. Apply broad knowledge, seasoned experience, and critical thinking skills to set direction and identify the appropriate goals for the teams to achieve enterprise objectives

• Communicate the vision that clearly articulates the direction for the team and deliver consistent key messages to support the strategic direction. Prioritize objectives and provide a cross-functional holistic approach to solution recommendations that includes ROI, implementation plans, scalability as well as alternative recommendations

•  Deliver on commitments by being results focused and efficiently leveraging team talent

• Guide teams to design and implement intelligent, predictable, reliable, scalable, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use platforms/solutions/services to serve Data & Analytics needs of the organization and solve for complex business problems

• Maintain FinOps focus for cloud costs and actively manage contracts and consulting expenditure. Continuously optimize the spend using automation, monitoring, process improvements. Partner with the department leader to manage budget including estimating costs of future development and tracking monthly spend. Drive continuous improvement and efficiencies with consulting partners and vendors

• Drive relentless pursuit of operational excellence, ownership and accountability. Prioritize resolution for major incidents and production issues impacting customers and business. Guide teams through root cause analysis, proactive identification and prevention of issues. Define and measure service level objectives (SLO/SLI) and key performance indicators (KPI). Identify patterns in issues and drive plans to improve the reliability of the platforms and solutions. Direct teams in the definition and maintenance of the data platform and solutions to ensure that the critical business insights and end analyst(s) needs are consistently met

• Understand and meet Security, Compliance, Regulatory requirements. Complete audits on time and follow change management processes. Promote strong Data Quality and Data Governance

• Inspire teams to go for greatness. Enrich company culture, promote continuous learning, champion cross functional collaboration, drive employee engagement and sense of belonging. Serve as an empowering coach to the team, enable the team by partnering with delivery/project managers to drive planning and execution for projects and quarterly OKRs/milestones. Lead work prioritization and remove roadblocks

• Empower your direct reports to lead their teams by providing the resources, training, feedback, and a sounding-board to be successful in their roles. Ensure the right skills are being used to solve the right problems while supporting the team with coaching, skills development, and career growth 

• Evaluate the talent landscape and create development and selection plans to fill future needs

• Attract, recruit, and retain a strong bench of skilled and highly engaged associates. Invest in associate development through career planning, individual development plans, file reviews, ongoing feedback, mentorship. Promote participation and leadership in company-wide DevOps and Innovation initiatives. Is a mentor to others; gets involved in the growth of others outside of the data area

• Communicate effectively with associates at various levels and promote team's accomplishments in forums such as townhalls, portfolio updates, stakeholder meetings, team and department meetings. Share regular updates on projects and initiatives with senior leadership, raise any roadblocks or impediments to delivery and recommend solutions to remove roadblocks

• Develop meaningful relationships with customers, partners and peers to achieve common goals. Courageously drive strategic initiatives and challenge upward and across the IT enterprise

• Possess an in-depth knowledge and stay current with the industry trends and best practices to evaluate and recommend cutting edge technologies, continuously improve what we do and ensure our customer experience is the best it can be. Drive a broader understanding and usage of Data & Analytics platforms and services across the organization

Purpose of the role

The Sr. Technology Manager’s primary responsibility is to partner with their business areas and provide technology solutions and services that help deliver CarMax’s strategic mission and plans. This Sr. Manager will lead a team of talented engineers enabling CarMax's technology journey. You will be results-oriented, data-driven, and have a proven record of accomplishment influencing outcomes without direct decision-making authority. The Sr. Manager will be comfortable guiding teams and setting performance standards and motivating associates to perform quality work.  The Sr. Manager, in partnership with their leader, is responsible foridentifying high performing talent, gaps in talent, and developing associates to close the gaps.  

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience

• 8+ years of Data & Analytics experience in an enterprise-level environment in two or more of the following areas: Data Engineering (Enterprise Data Lake/Data Warehouse), Cloud Computing, Systems Engineering, Master Data Management (MDM), Machine Learning (ML) Engineering, Infrastructure & Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Data Governance

• 5+ years experience in managing direct reports

• 5+ years of working experience in leading the end-to-end design, development and support of data management disciplines including [data platforms, data integration, modeling, optimization, Master Data Management (MDM), Business Intelligence reporting tools, Data Governance/Quality], and other relevant experience such as quality engineering, release management, monitoring and production support 

• 5+ years’ experience building enterprise-grade solutions with Microsoft Azure or equivalent cloud technologies 

• Experience in DevOps, version control systems (Git), Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, testing frameworks, Infrastructure as Code, building CI/CD pipelines (preferably Azure DevOps), scripting languages such as Python and shell scripts and working in an Agile/Scrum setting. Knowledge of ITIL framework and experience with Service Management tools such as ServiceNow

• Engineering mindset to propel the team towards the next generation technologies

• Proven ability to strategically prioritize by balancing business delivery and value generating work with technical debt and engineering excellence

•  Persuasive and influential communicator – able to explain complex or intangible concepts to stakeholders at all levels. Strong interpersonal skills are required to develop the vision by partnering with key stakeholders across the business, peer groups, and the Technology leadership team. Experience communicating, presenting, and working across functions to drive organization-wide solutions 

Data & Analytics Specific Qualifications:

• Experience building enterprise-grade cloud-native and SaaS Data & Analytics platforms and solutions. Microsoft Azure experience is preferred. 

• Experience with Snowflake, Databricks, Azure Data Factory and other Azure services, Tableau/Power BI

• Experience with Data Orchestration and Observability technologies and platforms

• Familiarity with Azure AI services (Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services) and Model Development and Deployment (ML Flow, Azure ML), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), Machine Learning, MLOps, Microservices and Event-driven architecture