Data & Analytics Engineering Manager — Player‑Coach Leader

Staffbase; Berlin (NH); Hybrid; USD 135,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

LTIP

Hybrid work model

Vacation days

Company pension

Volunteers Day

Job summary

Staffbase is seeking an Engineering Manager for Data & Analytics in a hybrid setup to lead a 4-5 person data engineering team while remaining hands-on as a technical player-coach. You will own delivery, align stakeholders, and mentor engineers to deliver data-driven outcomes.

You will shape data platform direction, drive architectural decisions, and partner with product teams to ensure robust data modeling and governance as AI data use grows.

Qualifications

• Proven experience at Staff Engineer level (or equivalent) in a data engineering context. You have been deep in the technical work and now want to lead people.
• A genuine player-coach mindset.
• Strong stakeholder management skills. You thrive in negotiation, can push back confidently, and know how to reach workable compromises with product teams.
• Solid data modeling skills and the credibility to make it a team-wide standard.
• Experience managing or developing engineers. Coaching technical fundamentals and growing product thinking.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to drive a cultural shift toward distributed, self-service data ownership.
• Comfort operating across both platform and product delivery contexts.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of 4-5 engineers: coaching, unblocking delivery, and building a product-minded data engineering culture.
• Own the team's roadmap sequencing. Negotiating priorities with product stakeholders, pushing back where needed, and finding constructive compromises.
• Mediate between platform and product demands: the team operates across data platform and product delivery simultaneously, and you will balance both.
• Bring hands-on experience in Data streaming to guide the team through an active transition.
• Raise the bar on data modeling across the team.
• Drive the cultural and technical shift toward distributed data ownership, helping product teams progressively own their own data.
• With your extensive Data Engineering experience you will collaborate with the broader staff engineering community on cross-cutting architectural decisions where needed.
• Build the foundations for AI data governance — as agentic analytics becomes customer-facing, you will need to think through guardrails, access control, and safety for AI agents interacting with data.

Skills

Staff Engineer level

Data engineering

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Data modeling

Hands-on data streaming

Product thinking

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Data Lakes

Orchestration tooling

Job description

Staffbase is seeking an Engineering Manager for Data & Analytics in a hybrid setup to lead a 4-5 person data engineering team while remaining hands-on as a technical player-coach. You will own delivery, align stakeholders, and mentor engineers to deliver data-driven outcomes.

You will shape data platform direction, drive architectural decisions, and partner with product teams to ensure robust data modeling and governance as AI data use grows.