Engineering Manager, Metadata

About the Role

Fivetran and dbt Labs are building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies. We're looking for an engineering manager to lead our Metadata team, which owns the metadata layer of the dbt platform: the discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history services that let customers understand, trust, and act on what their data is doing.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers, owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, career development plans, and regular 1:1s and check-ins
• Own project delivery for your team against the quarterly plan, and be accountable for the reliability and performance of the services you own (e.g. uptime and latency targets)
• Review technical designs and code, and provide feedback grounded in a deep understanding of the Metadata product area and architecture
• Drive the team to address technical quality — incidents, bugs, tech debt, and post-mortems — within SLA and metric targets
• Partner with product and business stakeholders on planning, and maintain a realistic, prioritized feature and project backlog with a high completion rate
• Contextualize and communicate the engineering vision and strategy to your team, and share the team's work and business impact with adjacent teams
• Ensure engineering processes (e.g. FDLC) are implemented and consistently followed
• Delegate effectively and build autonomy and a positive, high-trust culture within the team
• Address performance issues and conflict promptly and fairly
• Ensure your team uses AI tooling — IDE assistants like GitHub Copilot, coding agents like Claude Code, and conversational AI — to accelerate development and to author and review SDLC artifacts such as TDDs, PRDs, post-mortems, and test plans

Skills We're Looking For

• Experience managing and growing a software engineering team (ideally a customer-facing product development team); including hiring, coaching, and running a full performance and career-development cycle
• Strong technical foundation with the ability to review designs and code and make sound architectural trade-offs in a distributed, cloud-based systems environment
• Track record of delivering complex projects on schedule while holding the team to high standards of quality, reliability, and performance
• Experience owning production services and driving operational health — incident response, on-call practices, tech-debt reduction, and meeting SLAs
• Ability to plan and prioritize with product partners, maintain a realistic backlog, and drive high sprint and quarterly completion rates
• Communicates clearly and effectively across the team and with adjacent teams and stakeholders; keeps people well informed
• Fluent in using AI code assistants, coding agents, and conversational AI (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT) to support the software development lifecycle, and able to establish those practices across a team

Bonus Skills

• Experience building or operating metadata, catalog, lineage, or discovery/search systems
• Experience with GraphQL APIs and high-throughput, multi-tenant data services
• Familiarity with the analytics engineering workflow and the dbt ecosystem
• Experience supporting enterprise or single-tenant customers with strict reliability and latency requirements