At a glance
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- Ontario · USA - Oakland
About the role
- We’re looking for a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Core team behind dbt V2, dbt’s next-generation engine.
- This is a backfill role for an engineering leader who can combine strong software-engineering judgment with people leadership, product partnership, and the ability to navigate a highly cross-functional technical area.
- The Core team is responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving the Rust-based engine that powers dbt Fusion.
Responsibilities
- Lead, coach, and develop a fluid team of approximately 8 engineers working on a critical part of the dbt product.
- Establish clarity across a technically demanding roadmap with multiple product and engineering stakeholders.
- Partner closely with Product to translate ambiguous requirements into realistic engineering scope, sequencing, and estimates.
- Help the team balance new feature development, engine maintenance, framework modernization, documentation, and the stability of a GA product.
- Guide end-to-end technical design across the engine and its integration points with orchestration, the IDE, adapters, warehouses, and late compute.
- Support engineers in making sound tradeoffs across product value, technical quality, performance, compatibility, and delivery risk.
- Actively contribute to technical design and implementation alongside the team.
- Work with peer engineering leaders to coordinate initiatives that span multiple teams and systems.
- Build an environment where engineers can do high-quality work, grow their scope, and take ownership of meaningful technical problems.
- Help shape the next phase of dbt Fusion as a language-aware transformation engine used by the broader data community.
Requirements
- Experience leading teams through multiple concurrent priorities and diverse integration points.
- Strong software-engineering fundamentals and prior experience as a senior/staff engineer, technical lead, or equivalent hands-on technical leader.
- Ability to lead or facilitate system design from problem definition through implementation and delivery.
- Ability to translate complex or ambiguous product requirements into credible engineering estimates, milestones, and tradeoffs.
- Demonstrated judgment in balancing roadmap delivery with reliability, maintainability, technical debt, and product quality.
- A hands-on technical orientation, including a willingness and ability to stay close to code and engineering details.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with Rust or another systems programming language, compilers, query planning, language servers, IDE tooling, or developer platforms.
- Experience building or operating data transformation, orchestration, warehouse, or execution systems.
- Contributions to open-source projects or experience working with open standards and open technical communities.
- Familiarity with ecosystems such as Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, DuckDB, ADBC, or related data and execution technologies.
- Experience with SQL semantics, query optimization, transpilation across dialects, data lineage, governance, or developer-facing language features.
- Experience working in a remote-first or distributed organization with strong written communication practices.
- Startup or scale-up experience and comfort wearing multiple hats while the organization evolves.
Benefits
- 100% employer-paid medical insurance
- Generous paid time away from work, including paid vacation or flexible/unlimited vacation depending on role and country, plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave, paid holidays, including a year-end Global Week of Rest, and volunteer days off
- RSU stock grants
- Professional development and training opportunities
- Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
- Monthly cell phone stipend
- Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources
Skills
- Rust
- SQL
- Apache Arrow
- Apache Iceberg
- DuckDB
- ADBC
- Dbt
