Senior Manager, Platform Continuity

Datavant is the data collaboration platform trusted for healthcare. Guided by our mission to make the world’s health data secure, accessible and actionable, we provide critical data solutions for organizations across the healthcare ecosystem - including providers, health plans, researchers, and life sciences companies. From fulfilling a single patient’s request for their medical records to powering the AI revolution in healthcare, Datavanters are building the future of how data is connected and used to improve health.

By joining Datavant today, you’re stepping onto a driven and highly collaborative team that is passionate about creating transformative change in healthcare.

What We’re Looking For

We're seeking an Engineering Manager to lead Platform Continuity, a newly formed team within Cloud Platform Engineering that serves as the operational backbone of our multi-cloud infrastructure organization. This is a build-from-the-ground-up leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of operational discipline and engineering rigor.

Platform Continuity exists to execute the engineering work that keeps systems healthy and unblocked work that requires privileged access and platform judgment, but does not belong to a single product vertical and is not net-new design. Your team handles IaC drift remediation, VDI operations, monitoring and alerting hygiene, cloud cost management, and SRE-tier application support across Datavant's AWS and Azure environments.

The ideal candidate understands the difference between operational work and infrastructure engineering and holds the line between them. You build teams that work from playbooks, not ad hoc, and you're relentlessly focused on eliminating the work your team does by hand. You measure success not by ticket volume, but by how much repeatable work has been handed off to automation or back to accountable teams with runbooks that actually work.

You bring strong technical credibility with Staff-level SREs, a clear framework for operational intake and acceptance, and the management experience to lead a distributed team across US, Ireland, and Spain time zones. You communicate clearly across organizational boundaries, influence without authority, and know how to define scope precisely enough that nothing falls through the cracks and nothing that shouldn't be yours ends up yours.

What You Will Do

• Lead, develop, and retain a team of senior and staff-level SREs distributed across the US, Ireland, and Spain providing both people leadership and technical direction.
• Own the Operational Intake & Acceptance process: no system is handed to Platform Continuity without a runbook, architecture context, validated access, and a live knowledge transfer walkthrough.
• Drive the shift-left mandate every repeatable pattern your team closes is a candidate for automation. Partner with the Cloud Platform Tools team to route identified patterns for elimination, and hold the team accountable to not becoming a permanent owner of solvable problems.
• Manage operational work across five categories: IaC/Terraform workspace hygiene, VDI/end-user compute, monitoring and alerting upkeep, cloud cost management and rightsizing, and SRE-tier client and application support.
• Establish and track the team's north star metric: org-wide KTLO (Keep The Lights On) percentage reduction from an 86% baseline, with per-team breakdowns tracked quarterly.
• Build and maintain a playbook library that makes your team's operational work reproducible, auditable, and eventually automatable.
• Define and enforce intake criteria work that can be closed by pointing someone to a doc is ITSD scope, not Platform Continuity scope. Protect the team from misrouted tickets and return them to the right owner.
• Partner with Cloud Platform Infrastructure, Services, eSRE, and Tools leadership to maintain clean ownership boundaries and coordinate on cross-cutting work.
• Serve as the operational escalation point for platform-layer issues that engineering teams cannot self-diagnose, including production access, SSL certificate management, and system-state remediation.

What You Need to Succeed

• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including managing distributed or international teams across multiple time zones.
• Strong technical foundation in cloud infrastructure operations sufficient to establish credibility with Staff-level SREs and make sound judgment calls on scope and escalation.
• Knowledge of Terraform/IaC; hands-on experience managing infrastructure state, module versioning, and workspace hygiene at scale.
• Solid Kubernetes operational knowledge (EKS and/or AKS) cluster health, workload troubleshooting, and node management.
• Experience with AWS (required) and Azure (strong plus) in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments.
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms Datadog preferred including monitor management, alerting configuration, and dashboard governance.
• Demonstrated ability to build operational discipline: runbooks, SLAs, intake processes, escalation paths, and shift-left frameworks.
• Clear communication skills for defining scope boundaries, managing cross-team expectations, and explaining operational tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort with ambiguity this is a new team with a deliberately bounded scope, and you'll be defining the operating model in parallel with executing it.

What Helps You Stand Out

• Experience with Datadog in FedRAMP or GovCloud environments.
• Background managing operational or platform teams with an explicit automation-first or toil-reduction mandate.
• Familiarity with PagerDuty, Incident.io, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD).
• Experience in healthcare technology, life sciences, or other regulated data environments.

We are committed to building a diverse team of Datavanters who are all responsible for stewarding a high-performance culture in which all Datavanters belong and thrive. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other legally protected status.

At Datavant our total rewards strategy powers a high-growth, high-performance, health technology company that rewards our employees for transforming health care through creating industry-defining data logistics products and services.

The range posted is for a given job title, which can include multiple levels. Individual rates for the same job title may differ based on their level, responsibilities, skills, and experience for a specific job.

The estimated total cash compensation range for this role is:

$158,000 - $187,000 USD

To ensure the safety of patients and staff, many of our clients require post-offer health screenings and proof and/or completion of various vaccinations such as the flu shot, Tdap, COVID-19, etc. Any requests to be exempted from these requirements will be reviewed by Datavant Human Resources and determined on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the state in which you will be working, exemptions may be available on the basis of disability, medical contraindications to the vaccine or any of its components, pregnancy or pregnancy-related medical conditions, and/or religion.

This job is not eligible for employment sponsorship.

Datavant is committed to a work environment free from job discrimination. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other legally protected status. To learn more about our commitment, please review our EEO Commitment Statement here. Know Your Rights, explore the resources available through the EEOC for more information regarding your legal rights and protections. In addition, Datavant does not and will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay.

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