Explore rewarding Starburst Administrator Operations Lead jobs, a critical senior role at the intersection of data infrastructure, platform engineering, and business intelligence operations. Professionals in this career path are responsible for the end-to-end management, optimization, and governance of enterprise-scale Starburst Data (formerly Starburst Enterprise) platforms, which serve as a high-performance SQL query engine for distributed data sources. The core mission is to ensure a secure, highly available, and performant data access layer that empowers organizations to conduct analytics across diverse data lakes, warehouses, and other sources without moving data. Typical responsibilities for a Starburst Administrator Operations Lead encompass a wide spectrum of technical and leadership duties. On the technical side, this includes installing, configuring, and upgrading Starburst software; performance tuning of clusters and complex query plans; and implementing resource governance through resource groups and query rules. A significant portion of the role involves configuring and maintaining catalogs for heterogeneous data sources (like Hive, Delta Lake, RDBMS, etc.), troubleshooting connectivity issues, and ensuring seamless integration with BI tools such as Tableau and SAS. Security and compliance are paramount, requiring the professional to manage authentication (LDAP, SSO), implement robust role-based access control (RBAC), and ensure comprehensive audit logging. From an operational standpoint, the lead designs and tests disaster recovery strategies, automates routine operations via scripting and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), monitors system health and costs—especially in cloud environments—and provides high-level (L3/L4) support as the subject matter expert. The role also demands strong leadership in incident management, conducting root cause analyses for production issues, and developing standard operating procedures (SOPs) and runbooks for the team. Collaboration is key, as the lead works with cross-functional engineering and application teams to onboard new data sources, build capabilities, and publish architectural best practices and design patterns. Candidates pursuing Starburst Administrator Operations Lead jobs typically need a strong foundation in computer science or a related field, complemented by extensive experience in database administration, Linux systems, and shell scripting. Proficiency with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container orchestration with Kubernetes is standard. The Starburst Certified Practitioner certification is often a valued or required credential. Beyond technical acumen, success in these jobs relies on excellent problem-solving skills, the ability to work under pressure, and superb communication skills for documentation and cross-team collaboration. Ideal candidates are self-motivated leaders, eager to share knowledge, drive automation, and ensure the data platform reliably serves the entire organization's analytical needs.
