Data Platform Engineering Manager - AI-Driven Analytics

Circle; Little Rock (AR); On-site; USD 195,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Circle is seeking an DP Engineering Manager to lead a team of senior data platform engineers, delivering an ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real-time data stack for analytics, monitoring, and AI workloads.

You will own the roadmap, guide architecture, and partner with staff engineers while growing the team and aligning with Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Product teams. Strong leadership and hands-on coding are expected.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering management experience, including hiring, performance management, and mentoring.
• Deep data platform experience: warehouse, orchestration, streaming, or ingestion at scale (BigQuery, Airflow, Pub/Sub, Kafka, Iceberg or equivalents).
• Proven track record of defined data SLOs, data validation, and architectural changes for data correctness.
• AI and agentic fluency: led or built data systems with LLMs, semantic layers, or pipeline agents.
• Self-service platform thinking: designed platforms used by multiple teams with adoption driving metrics.
• Technical leadership: ownership of high-impact platform projects end to end and successful releases.
• Hands-on: able to read code, review designs, and prototype production code.
• Clear communicator and collaborator: write design docs, explain complex systems to analysts and partners, offer direct recommendations.
• AI fundamentals: understand model training/evaluation, data labeling, versioning, and controlling data quality.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision, architecture, and roadmap for data ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real-time data services.
• Lead and grow senior engineers, cultivating senior ICs into technical leaders.
• Oversee AI-agent management, guardrails, and output quality against human standards.
• Ensure datasets are managed as AI infrastructure with provenance, access controls, and reproducibility.
• Promote self-service by enabling onboarding of sources, pipelines, dashboards, and monitoring without tickets.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, Product, Security, and Finance to reuse platform capabilities.
• Stay close to code through design reviews, incident response, and prototyping where beneficial.
• Communicate complex designs to analysts, scientists, engineers, and finance partners; provide clear recommendations.

Skills

People management

Data platform

AI/ML

Cloud/data warehouse

Programming (Python/Go/Java)

Distributed teams

Tools

BigQuery

Airflow

Pub/Sub

Kafka

Iceberg

Job description

Circle is seeking an DP Engineering Manager to lead a team of senior data platform engineers, delivering an ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real-time data stack for analytics, monitoring, and AI workloads.

You will own the roadmap, guide architecture, and partner with staff engineers while growing the team and aligning with Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Product teams. Strong leadership and hands-on coding are expected.