Senior Manager of Data Engineering

Join Justworks, a rapidly growing company that is revolutionizing the way businesses manage their operations. As the Senior Manager of Data Engineering, you will lead the data platform organization, set technical direction, drive operational excellence, and ensure the platform is reliable and scalable. You will also lead and develop a team of data engineers, partner with cross-functional teams, and drive planning processes that connect platform priorities to the overall strategy.

• Lead the data platform organization, setting technical direction, driving operational excellence, and ensuring the platform is reliable, scalable, and built to support the company's growth.
• Own the technical direction of Justworks' core data platform — pipelines, infrastructure, orchestration, and the standards that keep it trustworthy.
• Lead and develop a team of data engineers, including direct line managers and individual contributors at various levels, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• You think in systems - how pipelines, orchestration, governance, and observability connect to produce a trustworthy platform - and you know how to build a team that operates with both craft and urgency
• Snowflake is core to how we operate and you should have depth there
• You've led teams through scale — evolving architecture, improving reliability, and making hard tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality
• You're a hands-on engineering leader with deep experience building and operating modern data platforms
• You develop engineers, set a high technical bar, and create an environment where people grow
• You're as comfortable reviewing a PR or debugging a pipeline failure as you are setting quarterly roadmap priorities or presenting a platform strategy to senior leadership
• You bring strong opinions grounded in experience with modern PaaS data stack technologies - Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt, Estuary - and you've seen what works and what doesn't at scale
• As a Sr. Manager, Data Platform Engineering,, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately results in our success as an organization
• Skills and Knowledge - the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve
• Openness - Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You’re curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others
• Manages Complexity - Making sense of complex, high quantity, and sometimes contradictory information to effectively solve problems
• Grit - You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You’re committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude
• Teamwork & Communication - Honors diverse thoughts and opinions; leverages unique skills to maximize efficiency
• Influence and Leadership - fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking across the organization
• In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for:
• Simplicity - Be like Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
• Camaraderie - Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You’re an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others
• Integrity - Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You’re honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example
• Balances Stakeholders - Understands internal and external stakeholder requirements, expectations, and needs and acts fairly despite conflicting demands of stakeholders
• Plans & Aligns - Ensures individual actions support company mission; communicates effectively; understands urgency and plans accordingly
• Good Judgment - Pauses before acting; asks questions to fully understand context; applies critical thinking and takes ownership of outcomes
• 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)
• Point of view on how AI is changing data platform engineering — both in how the team works and what the platform enables
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including experience managing managers or leading a multi-team engineering organization
• You're a builder who applies systems thinking to internal infrastructure. You're comfortable working across a diverse data organization and partnering with leadership to turn fragmented ways of working into scalable, durable systems
• 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
• Experience leading a distributed engineering team across multiple workstreams and delivery tracks
• Strong expertise with AWS services (S3, Lambda, Fargate, Redshift, Kinesis) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving work forward in a fast-moving environment
• Strong architectural judgment - able to make sound decisions on pipeline design, infrastructure patterns, and platform evolution
• Deep proficiency in SQL and Python; recognized by peers for technical rigor
• Deep Snowflake expertise - schema design, query optimization, cost governance, data sharing, and performance tuning at scale
• 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)