Data Platform Engineering Manager, AI-Driven Pipelines

Circle; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 195,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Circle is seeking a Data Platform Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real‑time data services across Circle’s data ecosystem. You will own the roadmap, partner with our Staff Engineer on architecture, and mentor engineers while collaborating with Data Eng, Data Science, Analytics, Product, Finance, and Security.

This hands‑on leadership role emphasizes correctness, self‑service, and AI agent readiness.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of people management experience
• 6+ years in data, ML, or platform engineering
• Hands-on with large-scale data infrastructure

Responsibilities

• Own the vision, architecture, and roadmap for Circle’s ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real‑time data services.
• Manage, coach, and grow senior engineers. Develop senior ICs into technical leaders and hire well.
• Lead AI‑agent management, guardrails, and review standards. Hold agent output to a human engineer’s quality bar.
• Treat datasets as AI infrastructure. Curate, version, and govern training, fine‑tuning, and evaluation sets with provenance, labeling workflows, access controls, and deterministic reproducibility.
• Use AI to multiply team output. Equip engineers with agentic tools for design, coding, testing, on‑call, and documentation; measure the gains.
• Make correctness and data quality platform features through SLOs, data contracts, lineage, automated checks, and clear dataset ownership.
• Build the platform’s AI and agentic layer: metadata, semantic context, natural‑language access to canonical data, pipeline and on‑call agents, and deterministic, auditable evaluations within existing access controls.
• Make the platform self‑service. Let Data Engineering and product teams onboard sources, pipelines, dashboards, and monitoring rules without filing tickets.
• Operate a reliable production platform with clear SLAs, cost attribution, budget planning, vendor upgrades with rollback plans, and honest status reporting.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, Product Engineering, Security, TechOps, and Finance to build reusable platform capabilities—not one‑off pipelines.
• Stay close to the code: lead designs, review critical paths, debug production issues, and prototype when it accelerates progress.

Skills

People management

Data platform engineering

BigQuery / Airflow / Kafka

SQL / Python / Go / Java

AI‑driven data systems

Tools

BigQuery

Airflow

Pub/Sub

Kafka

Iceberg

Job description

Circle is seeking a Data Platform Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for ingestion, orchestration, warehouse, BI, and real‑time data services across Circle’s data ecosystem. You will own the roadmap, partner with our Staff Engineer on architecture, and mentor engineers while collaborating with Data Eng, Data Science, Analytics, Product, Finance, and Security.

This hands‑on leadership role emphasizes correctness, self‑service, and AI agent readiness.