Job Description:

You have a life. We like that about you.

At OCLC, we believe you'll do the best work of your life when you're living the best life possible.

We work hard to build the technology that connects thousands of today's libraries. But we also work hard to make a job at OCLC a meaningful part of a balanced life- not a substitute for one.

Technology with a Purpose. OCLC supports thousands of libraries in making information more accessible and more useful to people around the world.  OCLC provides shared technology services, original research and community programs that help libraries meet the ever-evolving needs of their users, institutions, and communities. With office locations around the globe, OCLC employees are dedicated to offering premier services and software to help libraries.

The Job Details are as follows:

The Director of Engineering, Data Services leads the teams responsible for OCLC’s data platform. Partnering with senior technology and business leaders is key to successfully charting the evolution of our current systems into the next generation of data architecture. You need to be both highly technical and a culture leader, marshalling teams behind decisions and establishing new norms.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Alignment

• Ensure that division’s work is aligned with company priorities across the business unit and strategic roadmap. Assess and prioritize initiatives across the business unit based on strategic alignment, return on Investment, technical fit, risk, scope, and process compliance. Execute against the strategic roadmap to achieve our goals for the data platform.


• Understand and communicate company business goals, activities, and processes. Retain technical competency and remain conversant about current technology trends and practices.


• Coordinates all data platform technology release management activities for products within the division insuring stable releases and high availability of our data ecosystem.

• Evaluate and coordinate the right engineering mix balancing prioritization of roadmap deliverables with strategic goals and tactical operations in an ongoing manner. Ensures Project and Program activities are aligned with Portfolio and Organization priorities across the business unit.

Management and Resource Planning:

• Responsible for resource alignment and allocation throughout division. Oversees planning, scheduling, resource forecasting, cost estimation risk and issue assessment, and change management initiatives.


• Responsible for leadership and team building. Measures and evaluates staff performance, developing and enhancing staff skills and competencies. Assures timely assessment of technical performance, early identification of issues and risks, and opportunities for growth. Responsible for resource alignment and allocation throughout division. Oversees planning, scheduling, resource forecasting, cost estimation risk and issue assessment, and change management initiatives.


• Is responsible for leadership and team building, measuring and evaluating staff performance, developing and enhancing staff skills and related routine business activities for the division.

Platform Management:

• Ensure stability and performance of our data ecosystem. Coordinate divisional release activities within to maximize system stability. Collaborate with operations teams to define infrastructure requirements for data storage, consumption, and integration. Assess third-party solutions and open-source solutions to understand and manage risks associated with both.


• Implement measures to ensure high availability, accuracy, and accessibility of data in the platform. Constantly monitor and refine the performance of data management systems. 


• Facilitate constant improvement of the organization's data platform. Design target state and strategic roadmap to improve platform against the goals of team and company. Manage the existing design, approves modifications, and ensures changes improve system outcomes.


• Coordinate inventory of data across platform components. Assist in creating a vision for data flow through the platform and organization.

Reporting Relationships: Reporting directly to the Executive Director leading the Data Services Organization

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in a Computer Science-related discipline required


• 15+ years of overall relevant experience


• 10+ years of experience in data management platforms at large scale including structured and non-structured data


• 6+ years of experience search in at large scale

• Expertise with large-scale, high-volume search and data platforms, especially capacity planning, support, and customization


• High level analysis and design software for new and existing systems.

• Demonstrated experience in industry standard programming techniques to translate requirements and designs into code.


• Shows understanding of the latest innovations for search technologies and optimization.


• Possess strong understanding of data modeling tools and standards, ETL tools, and big data technologies.


• Expert in data model design and dataflow architectures


• Experience in building microservices and data mesh architectures


• Proven skills in data retrieval and data research techniques


• Strong desire to innovate with new technologies.  


• Proactive in researching issues and getting clarifications on requirements.


• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Technical Knowledge, Abilities and Skills:

Expertise with:

• OLTP(Postgres, AWS RDS/Aurora, SQL Server)


• OLAP(Redshift, Athena, Snowflake)


• NoSQL(DynamoDB, MongoDB, Hadoop/ HBase)


• Search(ElasticSearch, Solr , Lucene)


• Messaging/Streaming(Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, SNS)


• Hadoop ecosystem and associated components (Map Reduce, HBase, Zookeeper, etc)


• AWS Cloud Architecture


• Understanding of Data formats XML/JSON


• Intermediate to advance Python knowledge


• Sound understanding of Knowledge Representation and Semantic Technologies. (OWL, RDF, SWRL, SPARQL, JSON-LD) including semantic modelling and data integration, data unification, knowledge graph design, ontology and taxonomy.


• Graph DB, Vector Database / LLM Generative AI


• Understanding of a mainstream development language such as Java /.Net C#

Working Conditions: Normal office environment.

ADA/EAA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.

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