Engineering Manager, Metadata

United States Digital Space LLC; Denver (CO); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

dbt Labs is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Metadata team to lead data‑oriented pipelines and APIs. You will own delivery, set technical direction, and coach engineers to build scalable, reliable services that power our data platform.

You will partner with product teams to plan work, drive improvements, and maintain high standards for latency and uptime while guiding engineers through career development and performance feedback.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a software engineering team and growing its capabilities.
• Ability to review designs and code and make sound architectural trade‑offs.
• Proven track record delivering complex projects on schedule with quality and performance.
• Experience owning production services and driving incident response, debt reduction, and SLAs.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a software engineering team, including hiring and coaching.
• Own project delivery against quarterly plans; ensure reliability and latency targets.
• Review designs and code and provide actionable feedback.
• Drive quality via incidents, tech debt, and post‑mortems within SLA targets.
• Partner with product and business to plan, backlog, and prioritise work.
• Communicate engineering vision and progress to teams and stakeholders.
• Ensure engineering processes (FDLC) are followed and improved.
• Delegate effectively to build autonomy and a positive culture.
• Address performance issues promptly and fairly.

Skills

Team leadership

Architectural review

Delivery ownership

Operational health

Product collaboration

Communication

AI tooling in development

Job description

From the company’s founding until now, our mission has remained the same: to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. With the company, customer data arrives in their warehouses, canonical and ready to query, with no engineering or maintenance required. We’re proud that more organizations continue to leverage our technology every day to become truly data-driven.

About Us

the company and dbt Labs are bringing together two industry-leading companies with a shared mission: helping organizations unlock the full value of their data.

Together, we’re delivering the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data — from the moment data moves, through every transformation, to the context teams and AI systems rely on. the company helps organizations automate data movement across the systems, clouds, engines, and tools they rely on. dbt Labs pioneered analytics engineering, helping teams transform data into reliable, governed insights. Together, we support thousands of organizations as they build a trusted foundation for analytics, AI, and better business decisions.

As we bring our teams and technology together, we’re building on the strengths of both companies while continuing to deliver the products and experiences our customers know and trust. It’s an exciting time to join us: we’re creating a company with the scale, talent, and technology to help more organizations put their data to work with greater speed, confidence, and impact. During this transition period, you may see references to both the company and dbt Labs throughout our recruiting process as we integrate our teams, systems, and career sites.

About the Role

the company and dbt Labs are building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies. We're looking for an engineering manager to lead our Metadata team, which owns the metadata layer of the dbt platform: the discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history services that let customers understand, trust, and act on what their data is doing.

You’ll own technical excellence and delivery of a single team, from evolving high-throughput APIs and data models, to hardening reliability and latency for enterprise and single-tenant customers, to shipping new discovery and catalog capabilities in close partnership with product. You’ll set direction, review designs and code, remove roadblocks, and grow the engineers on your team through coaching, feedback, and clear career development.

This is a full-time, fully remote position.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers, owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, career development plans, and regular 1:1s and check-ins
• Own project delivery for your team against the quarterly plan, and be accountable for the reliability and performance of the services you own (e.g. uptime and latency targets)
• Review technical designs and code, and provide feedback grounded in a deep understanding of the Metadata product area and architecture
• Drive the team to address technical quality — incidents, bugs, tech debt, and post-mortems — within SLA and metric targets
• Partner with product and business stakeholders on planning, and maintain a realistic, prioritized feature and project backlog with a high completion rate
• Contextualize and communicate the engineering vision and strategy to your team, and share the team's work and business impact with adjacent teams
• Ensure engineering processes (e.g. FDLC) are implemented and consistently followed
• Delegate effectively and build autonomy and a positive, high-trust culture within the team
• Address performance issues and conflict promptly and fairly
• Ensure your team uses AI tooling — IDE assistants like GitHub Copilot, coding agents like Claude Code, and conversational AI — to accelerate development and to author and review SDLC artifacts such as TDDs, PRDs, post-mortems, and test plans

Skills We’re Looking For

• Experience managing and growing a software engineering team, including hiring, coaching, and running a full performance and career-development cycle
• Strong technical foundation with the ability to review designs and code and make sound architectural trade-offs in a distributed, cloud-based systems environment
• Track record of delivering complex projects on schedule while holding the team to high standards of quality, reliability, and performance
• Experience owning production services and driving operational health — incident response, on-call practices, tech-debt reduction, and meeting SLAs
• Ability to plan and prioritize with product partners, maintain a realistic backlog, and drive high sprint and quarterly completion rates
• Communicates clearly and effectively across the team and with adjacent teams and stakeholders; keeps people well informed
• Fluent in using AI code assistants, coding agents, and conversational AI (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT) to support the software development lifecycle, and able to establish those practices across a team

Bonus Skills

• Experience building or operating metadata, catalog, lineage, or discovery/search systems
• Experience with GraphQL APIs and high-throughput, multi-tenant data services
• Familiarity with the analytics engineering workflow and the dbt ecosystem
• Experience supporting enterprise or single-tenant customers with strict reliability and latency requirements

The compensation range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire compensation for the target position and level, and may include sales incentives or target bonuses depending on the role. Our compensation ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Our job titles may span more than one career level. Within the range, individual compensation is determined by additional factor