Data Expertise Manager – Customer Operations

Job Title : Data Expertise Manager – Customer Operations

Location: Bangalore, India

Function: Customer Operations – Data Foundation

Scope: Global

Employment Type: Full-time, Hybrid

About the Role

Great customer operations run on great data. As our Data Expertise Manager, you will lead a globally distributed team of Data SMEs, Data Experts, Data Engineers, Business Analysts and partner colleagues, most of whom are based in Bangalore. Acting as the bridge between Customer Operations, Data Foundation, product teams, markets and delivery partners, you will build the trusted, well-governed and scalable data foundations behind our global Customer Operations, turning business priorities into reusable data products that are ready for reporting, analytics and AI. This is a genuinely hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys combining people leadership with real technical depth.

What You Will Do

• Lead and grow the team: coach and develop your team with clear objectives and career growth, embedding business process knowledge into data design.

• Own delivery end to end: take Customer Operations data products and programmes from demand shaping and roadmap planning through build, release, post-go-live support (SLAs, incident management) and retirement.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership: translate business requirements into specifications, data models, pipelines and support models, and lead data analysis, profiling, modelling and solution design.

• Safeguard quality and compliance: review designs against enterprise standards for architecture, reuse, performance, resilience, security, privacy and governance, and drive automated data quality checks, reconciliation and monitoring.

• Enable AI and analytics: build AI-ready and analytics-ready foundations through trusted source integration, metadata, business definitions, semantic models and reusable consumption patterns.

• Partner and manage risk: align scope and priorities with Customer Operations, market, Data Foundation, platform, governance, product and partner teams, and resolve risks and issues with clear ownership.

• Manage capacity and cost: prioritise internal and third-party capacity and vendor performance, balancing speed, quality, cost and business value.

• Drive continuous improvement: champion simplification, standardisation, documentation and knowledge sharing, and build future-fit skills across engineering, cloud, governance, DevOps and AI enablement.

What You Will Bring

• Substantial experience (typically 10+ years, or equivalent demonstrable capability) in data engineering, data management, data architecture, analytics or BI, ideally in a global organisation, capability centre or shared services environment.

• Proven leadership of India-based or globally distributed data teams, including engineers, analysts, SMEs and third-party partners.

• Hands-on depth in modern data platforms (lakehouse, cloud data warehouse, ETL/ELT, orchestration, metadata, data quality and governance), including Databricks and GCP.

• Expert data modelling across relational, dimensional, semantic, operational and lakehouse patterns, for structured and semi-structured data.

• Strong stakeholder management across senior business, technology and vendor partners in multiple time zones, with delivery through Agile, Scrum, DevOps or product practices.

• Desirable: Customer Operations, Customer Development, trade promotion, order-to-cash, customer service, logistics or supply chain domain knowledge.

Technical Skills

• Programming: advanced SQL, Spark SQL, Python and PySpark for transformation, automation and testing.

• Databricks and lakehouse (essential): Databricks Workflows, Delta Live Tables, Apache Spark and Delta Lake, including medallion architecture, partitioning, schema evolution, change data capture (CDC), slowly changing dimensions and performance tuning.

• Google Cloud Platform (essential): BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and Cloud Composer, plus integration across Azure and GCP.

• Azure: Azure Data Factory, ADLS Gen2 and Synapse or equivalent.

• Pipelines and integration: batch and incremental pipelines ingesting from SAP and other ERPs, APIs, files and third-party sources (JSON, Parquet, CSV), with orchestration, monitoring and alerting.

• Engineering practice: Git, code reviews, CI/CD (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions), automated data testing, data observability and cloud cost optimisation.

• Data modelling (essential): conceptual, logical and physical models (dimensional, relational, Data Vault and semantic) using tools such as Erwin, ER/Studio or PowerDesigner, and reusable data products with clear data contracts.

• Governance and security: Unity Catalog, Microsoft Purview or Google Dataplex for cataloguing and lineage; role-based access, data masking and data protection compliance.

• Desirable: streaming (Spark Structured Streaming, Event Hubs, Kafka), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep, Databricks Asset Bundles), Power BI semantic models, and data preparation for machine learning and generative AI.

Certifications and Education

• Essential: Databricks Certified Data Engineer (Associate or Professional); Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer or Professional Cloud Architect; and a data modelling or data management certification such as DAMA CDMP, or equivalent demonstrable expertise.

• Advantageous: Azure Data Engineer or Fabric Data Engineer Associate; data governance, Agile (SAFe, PSM) or product management certifications.

• Education: bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Business Analytics, Operations Research or a related discipline; equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

How You Will Lead

• An inspiring people leader and coach who builds trust, clarity and performance across a globally distributed team.

• A clear communicator and pragmatic problem solver, with strong delivery discipline and commercial judgement.

• A collaborative, culturally aware and service-focused leader who balances strategic thinking with hands-on support.

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

Unilever embraces diversity and encourages applicants from all walks of life! This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity.

Note: "All official offers from Unilever are issued only via our Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Offers from individuals or unofficial sources may be fraudulent—please verify before proceeding."