Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Platform Leadership & Technical Direction

• Own the technical direction of Justworks' core data platform — pipelines, infrastructure, orchestration, and the standards that keep it trustworthy
• Lead architectural decisions on cloud data infrastructure, balancing scalability, cost, reliability, and security
• Drive operational excellence across the platform — observability, data quality, cost optimization, incident management, and SLAs
• Set and enforce engineering standards — testing, documentation, CI/CD, and code review best practices
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure as code, ensuring the platform is auditable, repeatable, and resilient

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead and develop a team of data engineers, including direct line managers and individual contributors at various levels
• Set a high bar for engineering craft — mentor engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Recruit and hire high-caliber data engineers as the platform team grows
• Create an environment where engineers develop their skills, take ownership, and do the best work of their careers

Cross-Functional Partnership & Delivery

• Partner with DNA functional teams (e.g. Analytics Engineering, BI, Data Science) and distributed Data Engineering teams to ensure the platform serves the full breadth of org needs
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to align on data contracts, security, compliance, and shared infrastructure
• Drive planning processes that connect platform priorities to DNA's overall strategy and enterprise OKRs

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in data engineering, with at least 5 years working hands-on with modern PaaS data stack technologies (Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt, Estuary, or equivalent)
• Deep Snowflake expertise - schema design, query optimization, cost governance, data sharing, and performance tuning at scale
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including experience managing managers or leading a multi-team engineering organization
• Strong architectural judgment - able to make sound decisions on pipeline design, infrastructure patterns, and platform evolution
• Experience leading a distributed engineering team across multiple workstreams and delivery tracks
• Deep proficiency in SQL and Python; recognized by peers for technical rigor
• Strong expertise with AWS services (S3, Lambda, Fargate, Redshift, Kinesis) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Strong experience with data governance, security, and compliance in a production environment
• Excellent communicator — able to engage technical and non-technical stakeholders, present platform strategy to senior leadership, and translate infrastructure investments into business terms
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving work forward in a fast-moving environment
• Point of view on how AI is changing data platform engineering — both in how the team works and what the platform enables

Nice to Have

• Experience building data platforms that support ML/AI workloads (feature stores, model pipelines, vector stores)
• Background in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment (fintech, HR tech, healthcare)
• Experience with streaming/CDC technologies (Estuary, Kafka, Debezium)

Technologies Used

• Languages: Python, SQL, Terraform
• Data & Analytics: Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran
• Streaming & CDC: Estuary
• Workflow Orchestration: Airflow, MWAA
• Cloud: AWS (S3, Lambda, Fargate, Redshift, Kinesis, Step Functions, EventBridge)
• Observability & Monitoring: Datadog
• CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions

Compensation

• The base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is targeted at $240,000.00 - $310,000.00 per year.