AVP, Principal Operations Engineer (L11)

Job Description:

Role Title: AVP, Principal Operations Engineer (L11)

Company Overview:  

Synchrony (NYSE: SYF) is a premier consumer financial services company delivering one of the industry’s most complete digitally enabled product suites. Our experience, expertise and scale encompass a broad spectrum of industries including digital, health and wellness, retail, telecommunications, home, auto, outdoors, pet and more.

• We have recently been ranked #2 among India’s Best Companies to Work for by Great Place to Work. We were among the Top 50 India’s Best Workplaces in Building a Culture of Innovation by All by GPTW and Top 25 among Best Workplaces in BFSI by GPTW. We have also been recognized by Ambition Box Employee Choice Awards among the Top 20 Mid-Sized Companies, ranked #3 among Top Rated Companies for Women, and Top-Rated Financial Services Companies.

• We provide best-in-class employee benefits and programs that cater to work-life integration and overall well-being.

• We provide career advancement and upskilling opportunities for all to take up leadership roles.

Organizational Overview:

The DataOps role is part of the Engineering team within Synchrony's Data & Analytics organization. This team is the operational backbone of Synchrony's enterprise data infrastructure — ensuring reliability, availability, and compliance of the Data Warehouse (DWH), Enterprise Data Lake (EDL), Cloud applications, and analytics platforms (SAS, BO, Anaconda, Tableau, Neo4j). The role involves day-to-day monitoring, incident management, ETL support, cloud operations, SOX/audit compliance, and continuous improvement of data operations processes through ITIL-aligned workflows and SRE practices.

Role Summary:

The AVP, Principal Operations Engineer is responsible for the operational reliability, compliance, and continuous improvement of Synchrony's enterprise data infrastructure. This role leads production support, incident resolution, SOX compliance, SRE practices, and automation across the Data Warehouse (DWH), Enterprise Data Lake (EDL), and Cloud platforms. The role partners directly with Data Platform, Engineering, and Data Quality teams to ensure stable, scalable, and observable data operations. It requires both technical depth and the communication skills to interface with senior and executive leadership on operational status, risk, and escalation.

Key Responsibilities:

• Monitor, triage, and resolve production job failures across DWH, EDL, and Cloud platforms using Stonebranch, Control Center, and AWS CloudWatch. Maintain operational continuity by following documented runbooks and escalation procedures.

• Support and troubleshoot Ab Initio, Spark, and Kafka-based ETL workflows. Validate data ingestion (headers, trailers, record counts, dates) and ensure SOX compliance on all data pipelines.

• Manage operational readiness for cloud-migrated applications. Maintain SOPs, runbooks, and transition-to-operations documentation in Confluence for all cloud applications.

• Handle ServiceNow incidents (INCs), change requests (CRs), and RITMs following ITIL-aligned workflows for change management, request hierarchy, and escalation. Maintain DataOps dashboards for INC/CR/RITM tracking and reporting.

• Prepare and submit evidence for SOX controls (data ingestion evaluation, job monitoring/alerting). Ensure audit-ready documentation and full traceability for all run activities.

• Publish SRE, Platform, DWH, EDL, and Cloud KPI metrics on a monthly basis. Design templates for operational metrics, identify documentation gaps, and drive resiliency improvements.

• Monitor storage utilization across DWH and EDL platforms. Support Tableau dashboard development for capacity forecasting, growth analysis, and threshold-based alerting.

• Create and maintain SOPs, runbooks and Design documents in Confluence. Ensure all documentation is centralized, version-controlled, and audit-ready.

• Manage Configuration Items in Tech Compass/CMDB.

• Interface with Senior and Executive Leaders within the data organization to communicate operational status, risk, and escalations. Execute communication strategies for incidents, planned maintenance, and data integration changes. Proactively communicate with data users and downstream stakeholders on impacts and resolutions.

• Identify and implement automation solutions to reduce manual toil and improve operational efficiency. Drive continuous improvement initiatives aligned with SRE and ITIL principles.

• Partner with Data Quality, Data Platform, and Engineering teams to ensure usability of all data products and effective transition to operations support. Provide guidance and direction for troubleshooting complex operational issues.

Required Skills/Knowledge:

• Hands-on experience with Ab Initio (ETL development, debugging, performance tuning).

• Proficient in writing and tuning SQL queries on enterprise databases (Oracle, Teradata, or equivalent).

• Shell scripting for monitoring, automation, and error handling.

•  Experience with enterprise schedulers — Stone branch UAC, Control Center, or equivalent.

• Working knowledge of Incident, Change, and Request Management; hands-on experience with ServiceNow.

• Strong understanding of DWH architectures, data ingestion, data quality, and the ETL lifecycle.

• Working knowledge of AWS services (S3, EMR, CloudWatch, Glue, Athena, EC2).

• Experience with production monitoring tools and alert-based triage workflows.

• Ability to create and maintain SOPs, runbooks, and operational documentation in Confluence.

• Experience using Jira Kanban or Scrum boards for sprint planning, backlog management, and work tracking within an Agile team environment.

• Experience in a regulated industry (financial services preferred) with working knowledge of SOX audit controls and compliance evidence preparation.

• Root cause analysis (RCA), pattern identification, and structured troubleshooting.

• Minimum 7–10 years of experience in Data operations, IT operations, or a related engineering discipline, including at least 3 years in a lead or senior individual contributor capacity.

• Demonstrated experience in a regulated industry; financial services experience strongly preferred given the SOX compliance obligations of this role.

• Willingness to adopt new technologies as the team transitions workloads to cloud platforms.

Desired Skills/Knowledge:

• Experience with Spark, Kafka, or the Hadoop ecosystem for big data operations.

• Familiarity with Tableau for operational dashboards and reporting.

• Knowledge of SAS Grid/Viya, Anaconda Enterprise, or Python in enterprise data environments.

• Understanding of SRE principles — Reliability metrics, SLOs/SLAs, and capacity planning.

• Experience leveraging AI/automation tools (GitHub Copilot, Rovo, etc.) for operational productivity.

• Familiarity with DevOps/CI-CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code concepts.

• Knowledge of Data Quality (DQ) frameworks and validation rules.

Eligibility Criteria:

Minimum 7+ years of experience with Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Data Engineering, or a related field or in lieu of a degree 9 + years of relevant experience.

Work Timings:  3PM to 12 AM IST

This role qualifies for Enhanced Flexibility offered in Synchrony India and will require the incumbent to be available between 06:00 AM Eastern Time – 11:30 AM Eastern Time (timings are anchored to US Eastern hours and will adjust twice a year locally). This window is for meetings with India and US teams. The remaining hours will be flexible for the employee to choose. Exceptions may apply periodically due to business needs) We are proud to offer flexibility at Synchrony. Our way of working allows you the option to work from home or workspaces in our Regional Engagement Hubs—Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, or Delhi/NCR. Occasionally you may be required to commute or travel to Hyderabad or one of the Regional Engagement Hubs for in person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, trainings, and culture events.

For Internal Applicants:

• Understand the criteria or mandatory skills required for the role, before applying

• Inform your manager and HRM before applying for any role on Workday

• Ensure that your professional profile is updated (fields such as education, prior experience, other skills) and it is mandatory to upload your updated resume (Word or PDF format)

• Must not be any corrective action plan (First Formal/Final Formal, LPP)

• Level 9+ employees who have completed 18 months in the organization and 12 months in current role and level are only eligible

• L9+ Employees can apply

Grade/Level: 11

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