Senior Manager, dbt Fusion

Denver, Colorado, United States, AMER · USA - Oakland · Remote · Posted Oct 5, 2026

At a glance

The Senior Engineering Manager will lead the Core team responsible for the Rust-based engine powering dbt Fusion.
This role involves managing a team of approximately 8 engineers while partnering with product and engineering stakeholders to evolve dbt's next-generation engine, SQL language features, and ELT primitives.

Lead, coach, and develop a fluid team of approximately 8 engineers.
Establish clarity across a technically demanding roadmap with multiple stakeholders.
Partner with Product to translate ambiguous requirements into engineering scope, sequencing, and estimates.
Balance new feature development, engine maintenance, framework modernization, documentation, and GA product stability.
Guide end-to-end technical design across the engine and its integration points.
Support engineers in making tradeoffs across product value, technical quality, performance, and delivery risk.
Actively contribute to technical design and implementation alongside the team.
Coordinate initiatives that span multiple teams and systems with peer engineering leaders.
Build an environment where engineers can grow their scope and take ownership of technical problems.
Shape the next phase of dbt Fusion as a language-aware transformation engine.

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.
Hands-on technical orientation with a willingness to stay close to code and engineering details.

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.

Remote-first or distributed organization environment mentioned as a nice-to-have context