Staff Data Engineer

Manifest OS

$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years in data engineering with architecture experience on a cloud data platform
  • Proficiency in BigQuery (or Snowflake/Databricks), dbt, Python, and advanced SQL
  • Real-world experience with orchestration, idempotency, and testing in production environments
  • Experience leading engineers as a formal leader or technical lead
  • Strong focus on access control, PII handling, and auditability in design

Responsibilities

  • Own and define the target-state architecture, ensuring a sequenced roadmap with trade-offs
  • Drive decisions between building vs. buying tools for data workflows
  • Maintain data trust by ensuring freshness, correctness, and enforceable standards
  • Establish and uphold a single definitional layer for consistent metric interpretation
  • Build foundational elements for AI features, such as identity resolution
  • Lead and develop the engineering team, reviewing complex designs and queries

Benefits

  • In-person collaborative work environment at the NYC office 5 days a week
  • Opportunity to influence key architectural decisions that impact company operations
  • Engage with multiple departments, enhancing cross-functional collaboration
  • Chance to lead and grow a skilled engineering team
  • Real-world impact on client trust and business operations through data architecture
Full Job Description
Youll own Manifests data platform - its architecture, reliability, and direction - and lead the team that builds it. The platform works, but scaling to the next order of magnitude requires deliberate architectural decisions: case data spans two generations of systems, identity resolution stitches together five sources per person, and the warehouse now needs to power AI product features, not just dashboards. Youll define what this platform looks like in two years, sequence a path to get there without a full rewrite, and keep the data trustworthy throughout. Youll report to the Director of Engineering and partner closely with Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Legal Operations. This is an in-person role - youll be on-site at our NYC office 5 days a week. What Youll Do • Own the target-state data architecture - ingestion, modeling, semantic layer, and serving - with a sequenced roadmap and named trade-offs • Drive build-vs-buy and tooling decisions across ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability • Own data trust: make freshness, correctness, and lineage observable; enforce standards in CI • Maintain a single definitional layer so one metric means the same thing everywhere - BigQuery, HubSpot, board deck • Build governed foundations for AI features, including identity resolution and canonical entity models • Lead and grow the team while staying close enough to the code to review hard designs and complex queries What Were Looking For Must-haves: • 8+ years in data engineering, including serving as architect - not just contributor - of a cloud data platform • Deep hands-on fluency with BigQuery (or Snowflake/Databricks), dbt, Python, and advanced SQL • Real production experience: your opinions on orchestration, idempotency, and testing came from being paged • Experience leading engineers formally or as a technical lead, with comfort in a player-coach role • Treats access control, PII handling, and auditability as core design requirements, not afterthoughts Nice-to-haves: • Marketing attribution or multi-touch modeling across CRM, product, and clickstream data • Experience building data foundations for ML or LLM-based product features • Background in legal, healthcare, or fintech; early data hire experience at a high-growth company This Is For You If... • Youd rather improve something real and working than build from an empty repo • You want your architecture to be load-bearing - decisions here affect ad spend, case staffing, and client trust • Translating between technical and business stakeholders energizes rather than exhausts you This Is Not You If... • You want a purely strategic role - this team is small and youll be in the code and the incidents • You need a clean slate - sequencing out of legacy systems is the job, not rewriting from scratch • Cross-functional prioritization conversations with marketing, sales, and legal ops drain you

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