Engineering Manager

What You'll Do

As a technical contributor (≈50%)

• Write production code and lead architectural design on the data platform — pipelines, storage layers, access APIs, and observability infrastructure
• Own technical decisions on Spark job structure, Iceberg table management, and streaming architecture on MSK/Kafka
• Review code at a level that raises the bar, not just catches bugs — you shape how the team thinks about distributed systems
• Drive modernization and tooling choices (Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Trino, and what comes next) with a bias toward operational simplicity and long-term maintainability
• Contribute to data governance: quality frameworks, lineage, access control, and compliance (GDPR, SOC2)

As a team lead (≈50%)

• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers on the hardest problems — you're in the design docs, the code reviews, and the incident calls, not observing from the side
• Give engineers real feedback in the moment: on a PR, in a design review, after a demo — not just in quarterly check-ins
• Spot where an engineer is stuck or growing and act on it directly, whether that means pairing with them, reshaping their scope, or getting out of their way
• Own the team's roadmap by understanding the technical work well enough to sequence it right and push back when priorities don't hold up
• Run recruiting as a technical process — define what good looks like for this stack, write the bar-raising questions, and close candidates because you can speak credibly to the work
• Handle the coordination and stakeholder management so the team doesn't have to — you're the buffer that lets engineers stay deep

What You'll Bring

• 12+ years of software engineering experience in data infrastructure, distributed systems, or backend platform engineering
• Hands-on production experience with Spark — you can tune jobs, understand the Catalyst optimizer, and have strong opinions on PySpark vs. Scala Spark
• Familiarity with the modern lakehouse stack: Iceberg, Kafka/MSK, Airflow/MWAA, Trino or Athena, and cloud-native AWS services
• Experience with Snowflake, dbt, and building data access APIs or platform tooling
• 2+ years of engineering management or formal tech lead experience — you've done performance reviews, owned a hiring loop, or led a team through a significant technical program
• Comfort holding both hats: you can spend a morning in code review and an afternoon in a difficult growth conversation, and you're good at both
• Strong communicator who can make technical trade-offs legible to product and business stakeholders
• Experience in a startup or high-growth SaaS environment
• Exposure to AI/ML data pipelines or real-time analytics is a plus