Data Lake Platform Manager
Group overview
Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we operate construction and manufacturing businesses, design and development centers, and a host of facilities in the Middle East and other countries.
alfanar is involved in:
Electrical, electromechanical and civil engineering construction
Manufacturing and marketing electrical construction products
Allied engineering services
Our main divisions:
alfanar electric
alfanar construction
alfanar building systems
Job purpose
To ensure the data lake platform is stable, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient, enabling reliable access to data for analytics, reporting, and data science. Maintains platform performance and governance while supporting continuous improvement and collaboration across technical and business teams.
Key accountability areas
Platform operations & management:
Manage the day-to-day operations of the data lake platform across cloud or on-premises environments
Ensure high availability, reliability, and performance of data storage and processing services
Monitor platform health, identify issues, and lead resolution efforts
Oversee compute, storage, and pipeline resource utilization
Performance & cost optimization:
Monitor system performance, usage trends, and capacity requirements
Optimize infrastructure costs across storage and compute resources
Identify performance bottlenecks and implement corrective improvements
Ensure scalability of the platform to support growing data volumes and workloads
Data governance, security & compliance:
Enforce data access controls, security policies, and compliance requirements
Implement and maintain data lifecycle management policies (retention, archiving, deletion)
Support internal and external audit requirements
Ensure secure handling of sensitive and regulated data
Platform development & change management:
Coordinate platform upgrades, patches, and feature enhancements
Collaborate with engineering teams on infrastructure and architecture improvements
Manage integration of new tools and services into the data ecosystem
Ensure controlled and low-risk deployment of platform changes
Stakeholder support & enablement:
Support data engineers, analysts, and data scientists using the platform
Troubleshoot platform, pipeline, and data access issues
Improve usability, discoverability, and accessibility of data assets
Act as escalation point for platform-related incidents and requests
Monitoring, reporting & documentation:
Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for platform health, cost, and usage
Provide regular reporting to leadership on platform performance and risks
Maintain operational documentation and standards for platform usage
Recommend improvements based on monitoring insight
Role accountability
HR proficiency:
Ability to recruit, recognize and cultivate high performers and expose them in order to create a robust second line of management
Ability to recognize low performers and guide them to improve or release them
Ability to treat subordinates equally without any discrimination
Assessment criteria of subordinates is performance that leads to planned results
Ensure availability of delegation of authority matrix to have sufficient delegations as per company policy
Responsibility:
Must take full responsibility for his operation as per the job description and the required deliverables from this position, taking into consideration the general company guidelines
Able to anticipate problems and make the necessary proactive steps to prevent them
Ability to take necessary and proper timely decisions
Delivery:
Deliver the required results in timely manner with required quality and cost
Making a tangible difference:
Must make a tangible difference to his area of operation and exceed business expectations
Business planning and performance:
Able to transform the corporate goals into business plans
Able to plan, follow-up and execute those plans, whether they are annual or development plans
Monitor the plan performance and initiate action to strengthen results and take the corrective action accordingly
Provide periodic work progress reports
Responsible for monitoring and controlling budgets and expenses to achieve the optimum cost efficiency
Organizational development:
Develop the organizational structure according to the current requirements taking into consideration future and development plans
Ensure availability of job descriptions for all job roles and deployment
Business process improvements:
Develop, coordinate well-defined written systems, policies, procedures, and seek automation opportunities as much as possible
Should be conversant and able to navigate through IT solutions especially those relevant to his job and business
Promote the automated systems and use them fully, to spread its culture
Quality:
Quality is considered as alfanar’s prime competitive advantage; as such, managers are expected to act accordingly.
Adaptation:
Adapt to new and alternative techniques, technologies, management structures, and business models.
Health, safety and environment:
Ensure a safe, secure, and legal work environment as per the standard regulations.
Academic qualification
Bachelor degree in computer engineering or any relevant field
Work experience
10-15 years
Technical / functional competencies
Data analysis
Data lifecycle management
Data planning