Senior Executive Manager Data Modernization Lead📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Bupa Arabia is seeking a Senior Executive Manager – Data Modernization Lead to join its Data Office in Jeddah. This full-time position is critical for the end-to-end design, build, and operationalization of Bupa Arabia's cloud-native data platform, initially leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and BigQuery, to serve over 12 million members. The role requires 5-10 years of experience and focuses on platform construction, including coding, engineering standards, data quality enforcement, and system scalability. The successful candidate will also provide technical authority over external implementation vendors, ensuring accountability for SLA benchmarks and engineering quality.

This role is responsible for delivering a Vertical Slice (Business-First Agile) implementation, aiming for the first measurable business value within 90 days, full enterprise scale within 12–18 months, and a platform compliant with NDMO and PDPL from Day 1.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and operate GCP DataStream CDC pipelines from all Oracle sources, and build event-driven ingestion using Pub/Sub + Dataflow.
• Engineer schema evolution pipelines to automatically handle new columns, type changes, and table additions in source systems without failures or manual code changes.
• Enforce metadata capture, including source system, timestamp, job ID, record count, schema version, and lineage marker, logged on every ingestion event.
• Author and maintain all silver and gold layer dbt models in dbt Cloud with Git version control, CI/CD deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions), and automated dbt test suites.
• Write dbt tests covering completeness, uniqueness, referential integrity, and custom business logic.
• Design the Analytical MDM layer, creating golden records for Customer and Member with de-duplication, survivorship rules, and multi-year history preservation.
• Build and govern the BI Layer and Look ML semantic layer for 50+ Tier-1 KPIs with reusable, governed dimensions and measures.
• Enable self-service exploration, allowing business users to drill from aggregate KPIs to individual claim or member records without writing SQL or requesting analyst support.
• Configure Looker role-based access controls aligned precisely to BigQuery.
• Implement embedded analytics for internal portals and clinical dashboards via the Looker REST API; maintain T-1 daily refresh and sub-15-minute micro-batch refresh for operational dashboards.

Data Governance and Compliance

• Configure and operate GCP Dataplex for automated data discovery, column-level PII / PHI / SPI classification, data lineage (Bronze → Silver → Gold → Looker), business glossary, and DQ monitoring across all Medallion layers.
• Enforce NDMO compliance: ensure all data resides in GCP me-central2 (Dammam, KSA), with applied and auditable data classification taxonomy, and PDPL retention policies enforced at the column level.
• Build and maintain automated source-to-target reconciliation: daily validate that bronze, silver, and gold data reconcile to source with zero tolerance on Tier-1 financial KPIs before any report is released.
• Define and enforce the Definition of Done for all data engineering deliverables, ensuring no dataset is complete until dbt tests pass, documentation is merged, lineage is captured, and DQ gates are green.

AI/ML Data Pipeline Development

• Design and populate the Vertex AI Feature Store from Gold layer data, enabling Wave 1 AI use cases such as FWA Service Overutilization, FWA Duplicated Claims, FWA Provider Collusion, Document OCR Extraction, and member churn propensity.
• Build Vertex AI Pipelines for automated model training, evaluation, promotion to Model Registry, and deployment to production inference endpoints, eliminating manual notebook-to-production processes.
• Enable BigQuery ML as a self-service modeling tool for actuarial and finance analysts requiring SQL-based predictive model development.

Platform Engineering and Vendor Management

• Own the GCP landing zone, including multi-environment architecture (Dev / UAT / Prod), GCP IAM with the principle of least privilege, Terraform IaC for all infrastructure, BYOK KMS encryption via Thales, and Cloud Composer orchestration.
• Operate a co-delivery model where Bupa Arabia engineers are embedded in vendor squads as co-developers, with all code committed to Bupa-owned Git repositories from Day 1, ensuring vendors retain no proprietary ownership of any deliverable.
• Drive embedded knowledge transfer, aiming for a minimum of 3 Bupa Arabia data engineers to be independently capable of developing new dbt models, maintaining pipelines, and operating the platform without vendor dependency by program close.

Qualifications and Certifications

• Experience in a regulated data environment (NDMO / PDPL / GDPR / HIPAA or equivalent) with demonstrable data classification, audit trail, and access control delivery.
• Health insurance, financial services, or actuarial data domain experience is highly desirable.
• Required Certifications: GCP Professional Data Engineer, dbt Certified Developer, and Looker Certified Explorer or Developer. A written commitment to achieve these certifications within 6 months of appointment is required.