Senior Manager, Data Engineering

📍 Remote (U.S.-Based)

About the Opportunity

Our client is seeking an experienced Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead a high-performing team responsible for building and scaling modern data platforms and analytics infrastructure. This role combines people leadership, technical strategy, and cross-functional collaboration to drive the development of reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient data solutions.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineering leader with deep expertise in cloud data platforms, data architecture, and team development. You will play a key role in shaping data strategy, improving engineering excellence, and enabling data-driven business decisions across the organization.

What You'll Do

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of talented data engineers.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Manage performance, career growth, and team development initiatives.
• Oversee on-call processes and improve operational efficiency through automation and self-service solutions.

Data Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute the vision for scalable, secure, and high-performing data platforms.
• Drive architecture decisions for data lakehouse environments, data modeling standards, governance, and access controls.
• Optimize data platform performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices including CI/CD, testing, code reviews, monitoring, and incident response.
• Champion strong technical documentation and knowledge-sharing practices.

Roadmap & Delivery

• Own the team's roadmap and strategic priorities.
• Lead capacity planning, project execution, and resource allocation.
• Remove delivery obstacles, identify risks proactively, and ensure successful project outcomes.
• Align engineering initiatives with broader business objectives.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics, and business stakeholders.
• Translate business requirements into scalable data solutions.
• Communicate progress, challenges, and key performance indicators to senior leadership.
• Drive alignment across teams while supporting organizational goals and priorities.

Talent Acquisition

• Support hiring efforts by defining role requirements, interviewing candidates, and building a strong engineering organization.

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of experience building and scaling engineering teams and delivering high-quality data solutions.
• 3+ years of direct people management experience.
• Proven experience managing large-scale production data pipelines.
• Strong experience with Apache Airflow and data orchestration best practices.
• Deep expertise with Snowflake or comparable cloud data warehouse technologies such as Redshift or BigQuery.
• Advanced SQL skills and proficiency in Python or another scripting language.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders and business leaders.
• Strong understanding of data governance, data quality, lineage, and operational excellence.
• Experience working within regulated or compliance-sensitive environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modern data stack technologies such as dbt, Fivetran, Airbyte, Kafka, or similar platforms.
• Experience driving cloud-based data transformation initiatives.
• Strong strategic thinking and organizational leadership skills.