Senior Manager, Data Engineering
Dropbox•3h ago
United StatesRemoteFull-timeSenior Level8+ yrs exp
Visa-friendly
Top focus
Senior Engineering ManagerEngineering ManagerVp EngineeringVp DataSenior Data Engineer
- Role Description
- We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for the reliability, quality, cost
- velocity of Dropbox's core data platform. This is a hands-on engineering leader who owns the pipelines and data products that Product, GTM, Finance
- the CTO organization depend on to make decisions.
- In this role, you will lead and grow a team of data engineers building and operating our ingestion, transformation, orchestration
- serving layers, as well as the self-serve analytics substrate that lets partner teams answer their own questions without bespoke engineering work.
- The ideal candidate is a deeply technical, product-minded engineering leader who can hold a high bar on system reliability and data quality while partnering closely with Data Science, Business Intelligence Engineering, Analytics
- Product to turn fragmented, ticket-driven data work into durable, reusable data products.
- Responsibilities
- Data Quality & Observability: Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics.
- Self-Serve Platform: Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy.
- Cost & Efficiency: Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner deeply with Data Science, BIE, Analytics, Product, Data Platform
- the CTO org to define the semantic layer, modeling standards
- data contracts that make downstream work trustworthy and fast.
- Engineering Culture: Establish rigorous engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD for data, incident response
- postmortems — and champion the effective, measured use of AI coding tools to improve engineering productivity.
- Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
- Requirements
- 8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience with increasing scope, ideally in high-scale environments.
- 3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team design.
- Deep Technical Expertise: Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration) on a modern lakehouse or warehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery).
- Reliability & Quality: Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines.
- Systems & Modeling: Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers.
- Stakeholder Management: Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals.
- Preferred Qualifications
- Platform / Self-Serve Experience: Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy.
- AI-Forward Engineering: Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails.
- Cost Discipline: Demonstrated success improving compute/storage unit economics without regressing reliability.
- Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices.
- Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners.
- Durable Skills
- AI fluency means using these tools to amplify human judgment, not replace it. We believe people with these skills will thrive as work and technology continue to evolve:
- Awareness: U nderstand yourself and others .
- Judgment: E valuat e information and mak e decisions in complex situations .
- Adaptability: L earn, adjust, and stay effective through change .
- Connection: C ommunicat e , collaborat e , and build trust .
- To learn more about why these skills matter and what the data shows about thriving through change, read this blog post from our Chief People Officer, Melanie Rosenwasser.
- Compensation
- US Zone 1
- This role is not available in Zone 1
- US Zone 2
- $202,700 — $274,300 USD
- US Zone 3
- $180,200 — $243,800 USD
Required skills
Data EngineeringBackendData InfrastructureSparkdbtAirflowDatabricksSnowflakeBigQuery