Engineering Manager, Metadata

Fivetran, Inc.; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 187,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance (employer-paid)

Paid time off

Professional development

Team events & virtual activities

Cell phone stipend

Mental health support platform

Job summary

Fivetran, Inc. seeks an Engineering Manager to lead the Metadata team, owning the discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history services that help customers understand and trust their data.

You will own delivery from API evolution to reliability, partnering with product to ship new capabilities for a scalable data platform. You’ll set direction, review designs, and grow engineers through coaching, feedback, and clear career development while ensuring high performance and low latency for

Qualifications

• Experience managing and growing a software engineering team, including hiring, coaching, and performance reviews.
• Strong ability to review designs and code and make architectural trade-offs in cloud-based systems.
• Track record delivering complex projects on schedule with high quality and reliability.
• Experience owning production services and driving operational health, incidents, and SLAs.
• Ability to plan with product partners and manage a realistic backlog with high completion.
• Proficient in communicating vision across teams and stakeholders.
• Experience using AI tooling to accelerate development and governance of SDLC artifacts.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a software engineering team, owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, career plans, and 1:1s.
• Own project delivery against quarterly plan, ensuring uptime and latency targets.
• Review designs and code and provide feedback grounded in metadata product domain.
• Drive quality through incidents, tech debt, post-mortems within SLA targets.
• Collaborate with product and business for prioritized feature/backlog.
• Communicate engineering vision and progress to teams and adjacent groups.
• Ensure FDLC and other processes are consistently followed.
• Delegate effectively to build autonomy and trust within the team.
• Address performance issues promptly and fairly.
• Promote use of AI tooling to accelerate development and SDLC artifacts.

Skills

People leadership

Team coaching

Architecture reviews

Distributed systems

Reliability engineering

Hiring

Cloud know-how

AI tooling in development

Tools

GitHub Copilot

Claude

Job description

From Fivetran’s founding until now, our mission has remained the same: to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. With Fivetran, 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

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

T ogether, 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. Fivetran 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 Fivetran and dbt Labs throughout our recruiting process as we integrate our teams, systems, and career sites.

About the Role

Fivetran 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.

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 factors, including job‑related skills, experience, relevant education or training, business need, market demands. The compensation range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.

Oakland Pay Range

$186,701 — $233,376 USD

Perks and Benefits

• 100% employer-paid medical insurance*
• Generous paid time-off policy (PTO), plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave policy, holidays (including a year end Global Week of Rest), and volunteer days off
• Professional development and training opportunities
• Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
• Monthly cell phone stipend
• Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching, and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.

*May vary by country and worker type - please reach out to your recruiter for more information

Fivetran brings together high-quality talent across the globe to make data access as easy and reliable as electricity for our customers. We value and recognize that our customers benefit from having innovative teams made of people from many backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Fivetran promotes diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging through attracting, recruiting, developing, and retaining a diverse workforce, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it helps us build a world-class company to better serve our customers, our people and our communities.

We are committed to ensuring that all candidates have an equal opportunity to participate in our interview process. If you require accommodations at any stage of the process due to a disability, medical condition, or any other circumstance, please don't hesitate to submit your request by filling out this form . We will work with you to provide reasonable accommodations to facilitate your participation and ensure a fair and accessible interview experience. Your request and any information provided will be kept confidential and will not impact your candidacy. We look forward to hearing from you and accommodating your needs to the best of our ability.