Engineering Manager, Big Data, Job Understanding

ZipRecruiter; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Exceptional benefits package

Flexible Vacation & Paid Time Off

Employer-matched 401(k) plan

Job summary

ZipRecruiter, a leading online employment marketplace in the United States, is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Recommendations Ecosystem. You will guide a high-impact team to modernize core data pipelines, storage, and access methods while strengthening data quality and security systems.

You will mentor 5 senior engineers, rebuild ingestion pipelines, and collaborate with data scientists and a product manager to align priorities.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of experience as a software engineering leader.
• Deep experience with modern big data frameworks (e.g. Spark, Hadoop, Hive).
• Streaming technologies (Kafka, Flink, Beam).
• Strong CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms) and coding skills.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience working on a B2C or B2B product.
• This role interacts with Product Managers to translate problems into engineering solutions and requires curiosity and problem-solving.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and unblock a senior team of engineers responsible for core job ingestion pipelines and data stores.
• Drive the rebuild of the job ingestion pipeline and refine data exposure to consuming teams.
• Prioritize initiatives to improve input data quality and handle low-structure content.
• Own improvements to fraud detection and blocking mechanisms.
• Partner with Engineering, Data Scientists, and Product Manager to balance requests and roadmap priorities.
• Ensure scalable real-time data processing and extend pipelines for personalization.

Skills

5+ years software development

Engineering leadership

Big data frameworks

Streaming technologies

CS fundamentals

Docker & Kubernetes

B2C/B2B product experience

Messy data handling

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Spark

Hadoop

Hive

Kafka

Flink

Beam

Job description

Chicago, IL

We offer a hybrid work environment. Most US-based positions can also be performed remotely (any exceptions will be noted in the Minimum Qualifications below.)

Our Mission:

To actively connect people to their next great opportunity.

Who We Are:

ZipRecruiter is a leading online employment marketplace. Powered by AI-driven smart matching technology, the company actively connects millions of all-sized businesses and job seekers through innovative mobile, web, and email services, as well as through partnerships with the best job boards on the web. ZipRecruiter has the #1 rated job search app on iOS & Android.

About the Team:

Recommendations Ecosystem

The Recommendations Ecosystem group owns the intelligence that connects job seekers and jobs in our marketplace. We aim to understand every job and every job seeker well enough to make matches that work for both sides. We structure and enrich the jobs corpus, build the foundational models that encode jobs and job seekers, and run the matching engines that put the right opportunities in front of the right people.

What our team owns

Our group is the authoritative source for job understanding and matching intelligence, focusing on accuracy, relevance, and trust:

• Jobs Corpus Understanding: ZipRecruiter takes in millions of job postings from employers, partners, and feeds. We own the ingestion and enrichment pipelines that turn raw postings into structured data. We use ML classifiers to infer job attributes like education requirements and pay, and we attach company and location data. We find and suppress fraudulent listings or terms of use violations, so the marketplace stays safe and worth using. The result is a canonical view of every job that recommendations, search, and employer products build on.
• Foundational Models and Embeddings: At the core of ZipRecruiter's matching ecosystem are models that encode everything we can learn about jobs and job seekers. We build LLM-based embedding models from job content, resumes, and behavioral signals. These are the building blocks for matching and other ML models across the company, and we serve them at scale online and in batch.
• Matching Engines: We are responsible for the ML systems that recommend jobs to job seekers and job seekers to employers across our app, website, and email. The engines cover large-scale candidate retrieval over vector DBs and orchestration that delivers fresh, personalized recommendations.

About the Job:

ZipRecruiter’s Recommendation Ecosystem Group provides the backend machine learning and data platforms that connect job seekers to the right jobs. Within this group, the Job Understanding team is the authoritative source for foundational job data, pipelines, and matching intelligence.

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead an experienced, high-impact engineering team. In this role, you will guide the team in modernizing core data pipelines, storage solutions, and access methods while enhancing data quality and security systems.

• Lead, mentor, and unblock a senior team of 5 engineers responsible for core job ingestion pipelines and data stores.
• Drive the rebuild of the job ingestion pipeline and refine how job data is exposed to consuming engineering teams.
• Prioritize initiatives that improve underlying input data quality and handle low-structure, user-generated content.
• Own and lead improvements to fraud detection and blocking mechanisms.
• Partner closely with other Engineering stakeholders, Data Scientists, and a dedicated Product Manager to balance requests and roadmap priorities.
• Ensure we can act on everything we learn about jobs in a scalable real time manner. Scale our data pipelines both for performance and maintainability so we can be ambitious about what data we collect and where we can personalize the job seeker experience.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of experience as a software engineering leader
• Deep experience with modern big data frameworks (e.g. Spark, Hadoop, Hive).
• Streaming technologies (Kafka, Flink, Beam).
• Strong CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms) and coding skills.
• Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience working on a B2C or B2B Product
• This role is for engineers who are talking with their Product Managers about problems to solve and turning them into engineering solutions. They are naturally curious, problem solvers, and deeply understand the product they work on.
• Must have experience dealing with messy/unreliable data (third party data sets, data integrations, migrations)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Modern data storage solutions (Delta Lake, HBase, Hudi).
• Scala

As part of our team you’ll enjoy:

• Competitive compensation
• Exceptional benefits package
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Time Off
• Employer-matched 401(k) plan

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $200,000 - $265,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location, and the range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location, role-related knowledge and skills, depth of experience, relevant education or training, and additional role-related considerations.

Depending on the position offered, equity, bonuses, commission, or other forms of compensation may also be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and other benefits.

ZipRecruiter is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or genetics.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in ZipRecruiter’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in a

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.