Manager, Data & AI Platform Engineering

Guild is a company that believes talent is everywhere and that opportunity should be too. They are seeking a Data and AI Platform Engineering Manager to lead teams building their Data platform and AI platform, focusing on developing a high-performing engineering team and ensuring the reliability and scalability of their data and AI systems.

Responsibilities:

• Build, develop, and retain a high-performing engineering team across two platform squads, owning hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development
• Drive the transition from ad-hoc AI usage to platform-powered, governed AI workflows, championing Guild's AI-native engineering vision
• Deliver a reliable, scalable, and secure data and AI platform that accelerates time-to-value for teams across Guild
• Manage, mentor, and grow engineers across the Data Platform and AI Platform teams by running effective rituals (sprint planning, retros, 1:1s) and fostering a culture of ownership, experimentation, and technical excellence
• Own hiring end-to-end for both teams: define roles, run interviews, calibrate leveling, and close candidates to fill out a high-performing organization
• Set and drive the technical roadmap for Apollo's platform layers (gateway, orchestration, eval, memory, and semantic) and the data platform that feeds into Apollo and Guild's broader product suite
• Make architecture decisions on build-vs-buy, vendor selection, and platform design trade-offs to ensure platform reliability, scalability, and security as adoption grows
• Partner with the Director of Data Engineering to align Apollo's direction with broader Foundations and company strategy
• Contribute to data governance, privacy, and compliance standards for AI/ML systems while staying current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape
• Build templatized solutions (Slackbots, MCP servers, agent templates) that accelerate time-to-value for other teams across Guild
• Champion Guild's data strategy to the entire company, ensuring data is accessible, well-governed, and powering key decisions

Requirements:

• A track record of building and leading high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development
• Ideally 8+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering management role
• Deep familiarity with data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow, dbt, FiveTran, BI tools) and AI/ML platform architecture (model serving, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, API gateway patterns)
• Strong product sense with the ability to translate business needs into platform capabilities and prioritize ruthlessly
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/production operations (monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLO management)
• Exceptional communication skills, comfortable presenting to executives, aligning with cross-functional partners, and writing clear technical documents
• Hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, or agent framework development
• Experience building internal data platforms or platform-as-a-product teams
• Background in education technology, HR tech, or marketplace businesses
• Experience operating in a 0-to-1 environment where you built a function from scratch