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Granica

Engineering Manager – Foundational Data Systems for AI

Lead a globally distributed team of 15-20 senior engineers building core data infrastructure for AI workloads. Hands-on technical leader owning table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake), distributed systems design, and petabyte-scale data systems.

190k – 290kMountain View, CAEngineering ManagementOnsite7+ YOE
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About the role

What You’ll Own

Team Leadership & Growth

  • Lead, mentor, and grow a senior engineering team across multiple geographies
  • Own hiring, onboarding, and career development in a high-bar engineering culture
  • Create clarity and accountability across a large, senior organization operating in ambiguity

Technical Direction & Architecture

  • Set technical direction through design reviews, RFCs, and principled architectural trade-offs
  • Remain deeply involved in architecture and system design decisions
  • Own the evolution of foundational systems including:
    • Table maintenance and data layout optimization
    • Metadata services and transaction management
    • Schema evolution and versioning
    • Distributed compute orchestration
    • Reliability, observability, and operational tooling
  • Systems operate on petabyte-scale datasets and must meet strict requirements for correctness, durability, and efficiency

Execution & Operational Excellence

  • Translate strategy into execution through clear roadmaps and milestones
  • Establish engineering standards for correctness, reliability, and cost efficiency
  • Lead incident response, postmortems, and system improvements
  • Operate infrastructure where correctness and durability are critical

Cross-Functional Partnership

  • Work closely with Research, Applied Systems, Product, and Infrastructure teams
  • Help move ideas from theory to production while preserving system integrity
  • Act as a technical and organizational bridge between research and engineering

What You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

  • 7+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering
  • 2+ years leading engineering teams or large multi-person technical initiatives
  • Strong system design experience across distributed compute, storage, or data platforms
  • Experience building or operating large-scale data infrastructure systems
  • Hands-on experience with one or more open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, or similar table-layer technologies
  • Understanding of table format internals, such as metadata layers and manifests, snapshot/transaction commit models, file compaction and table optimization, schema evolution and partitioning strategies
  • Experience working with distributed compute frameworks such as Spark, Trino/Presto, Flink, Ray
  • Strong programming ability in Go, Java, Scala, or Python
  • Comfort operating as a hands-on engineering leader (~30–40% technical) while managing a team

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience building data lakehouse platforms
  • Experience working on table format implementations or metadata services
  • Experience operating systems at petabyte-scale data volumes
  • Experience partnering closely with research or ML infrastructure teams
  • Experience scaling engineering teams in fast-moving, high-ambiguity environments

Compensation & Benefits

  • Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and substantial bonus for top performers
  • Flexible time off plus comprehensive health coverage for you and your family
  • Support for research, publication, and deep technical exploration

Skills

Apache IcebergDelta LakeApache HudiParquetSparkTrinoPrestoFlinkRayGoJavaScalaPythonDistributed SystemsData Infrastructure

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