Manager, Software Engineering (Data)

Firstup is dedicated to enhancing the employee experience through its intelligent communication platform, serving major corporations globally. The Software Engineering Manager (Data) will lead the development of scalable data platforms and manage a distributed team, while collaborating with various stakeholders to drive innovative solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the strategy, design, and delivery of scalable data platforms powering business intelligence, predictive analytics, and LLM capabilities across enterprise customers, built on modern microservices architecture
• Drive the successful completion of complex projects that span multiple domain teams as data is core to our platform
• Provide senior technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, and code reviews, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of Generative AI tools and coding agents to increase developer productivity, improve code quality, and accelerate innovation
• Partner closely with Product Management and Design to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Manage, mentor, and grow a distributed team of software and quality engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Own production health for your teams’ services, including on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews in a 'you build it, you run it' environment
• Lead operational excellence initiatives to improve observability, resiliency, automation, and alignment with defined SLOs and enterprise SLAs

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field of study; or commensurate professional experience required
• 10+ years of professional software experience, including 3+ years managing teams of engineers developing data pipelines and analytics applications
• Proven experience delivering customer-facing Enterprise Saas products at scale
• Strong hands-on or architectural experience with modern data platform tooling, including but not limited to Apache Airflow, dbt, Kafka, AWS Glue, AWS Redshift, AWS Sagemaker, AWS Dynamo, AWS Quick Sight
• Success leading a data engineering team through complex challenges that are large in scope
• Strong knowledge of modern data architecture, ETL/ELT processes, and data modeling best practices
• Strong knowledge of SQL, Python and Typescript
• Knowledge of AI tools including Langchain, Open AI Agents, and MCP APIs
• Excellent communication skills and understanding of the realities of developing in a startup environment (i.e. you know the difference between small problems and big ones)
• Experience scaling and evolving Enterprise SaaS platforms through periods of growth or technical transformation
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Generative AI tools and coding agents in software development workflows
• Exposure to HR Tech or other regulated enterprise domains