# Engineering Manager – Foundational Data Systems for AI
**Company:** [Granica](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/granica)
**Location:** Mountain View, CA
**Salary:** $190K-$290K
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Parquet, Spark, Trino, Presto, Flink, Ray, Go, Java, Scala, Python, Distributed Systems, Data Infrastructure
**Posted:** 2026-03-09
> 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.
## Job Description
## 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
**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/engineering-manager-foundational-data-systems-for-ai-at-granica-b6f0bf09-1dcd-4372-be45-3566fe09c5ad
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/engineering-manager-foundational-data-systems-for-ai-at-granica-b6f0bf09-1dcd-4372-be45-3566fe09c5ad