Engineering Manager, Ray Data

Anyscale; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 267,000 - 375,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity awards

Health coverage

Vision coverage

Flexible time off

Paid parental leave

Mental health support

Job summary

Anyscale is seeking an engineering leader to manage the open source Ray Data team. You will set technical direction, own the roadmap, and stay hands-on with design and reviews while mentoring engineers across distributed systems and data infrastructure.

You’ll work with external contributors in the open source community, collaborate with Ray Core, Ray Train, Ray Serve, and Anyscale platform teams, and help scale Ray Data to support AI workloads in production.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing engineers.
• Proven track record building distributed teams and scaling them quickly.
• Experience leading teams across US and India is preferred.
• Ability to hire, coach, and manage performance while maintaining high standards.
• Deep technical knowledge of distributed systems and data-intensive workloads.
• Hands-on Python and performance-oriented systems code experience.
• Strong execution track record with urgency and prioritization.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and roadmap for open source Ray Data.
• Drive execution of key projects from design review to release.
• Hire, coach, and grow a world-class team of engineers.
• Manage day-to-day planning, prioritization, on-call, and releases.
• Remain hands-on with design, code reviews, and performance investigations.
• Represent Ray Data in the open source community and review proposals.
• Collaborate with Ray Core, Ray Train, Ray Serve, and platform teams.
• Align workloads with product management and customers to shape the roadmap.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, and engineering excellence.
• Communicate the team’s work through talks, tutorials, and blogs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Team leadership

Hiring & mentoring

Python

Performance optimization

Communication

Project management

Open source experience

Tools

Ray

Spark

Flink

Beam

Delta Lake

Job description

About Anyscale:

At Anyscale, we're on a mission to democratize distributed computing and make it accessible to software developers of all skill levels. We’re commercializing Ray, a popular open-source project that's creating an ecosystem of libraries for scalable machine learning. Companies like OpenAI, Uber, Spotify, Instacart, Cruise, and many more, have Ray in their tech stacks to accelerate the progress of AI applications out into the real world.

With Anyscale, we’re building the best place to run Ray, so that any developer or data scientist can scale an ML application from their laptop to the cluster without needing to be a distributed systems expert.

Proud to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Addition with $250+ million raised to date.

About the role:

Anyscale is looking for an engineering leader to manage the open source Ray Data team. Ray Data is the Python-native data processing engine for AI workloads on Ray. It handles multimodal and structured data and powers batch inference, data loading for distributed training, and large-scale preprocessing. The team owns the open source library end to end, including:

• The streaming execution engine, including scheduling, backpressure, and resource management across CPUs and GPUs

• Batch inference for LLMs and multimodal models, including integrations with inference engines such as vLLM

• Data loading for production training workloads with Ray Train and popular ML frameworks

• Connectors for data sources and formats such as Parquet, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Lance, and cloud object storage

• Performance, stability, and fault tolerance at large scale

This is a first-line engineering management role where you'll lead a team of engineers, stay involved in technical design and code, and own the team's roadmap within the open source project. Ray Data has a large and active community, so you'll also work closely with external contributors to review designs, guide technical direction, and support the project's continued growth and success. The team plays an important role in the broader Ray ecosystem and contributes directly to Anyscale's success.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction and roadmap for open source Ray Data, balancing community needs, customer needs, and Anyscale's product goals

• Drive execution of the team's key projects, from design review through release

• Hire, coach, and grow a world-class team of distributed systems and data infrastructure engineers

• Run the team day to day: planning, prioritization, project tracking, on-call, and release quality

• Stay technically hands-on through design and code review, performance investigations, and escalations on critical production issues

• Represent Ray Data in the open source community: work with external contributors and maintainers, review Ray Enhancement Proposals, keep GitHub issue and PR triage healthy, and grow the contributor base

• Partner with the Ray Core, Ray Train, Ray Serve, and Anyscale platform teams on cross-library features and end-to-end performance

• Work with product management, field engineering, and customers, including AI-native companies running Ray Data at large scale, to understand their workloads and turn them into roadmap priorities

• Build and maintain a team culture of collaboration, ownership, and high engineering standards

• Communicate the team's work to a broader audience through talks, tutorials, blog posts, and at Ray Summit

• Help us build and shape a world-class company

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing engineers, ideally at a high-growth startup

• A record of building high-performing distributed teams and helping them scale quickly while maintaining a good culture

• Experience with building and managing teams across geographic locations, preferably in US and India

• Ability to keep a high hiring bar, motivate the team, coach and mentor engineers, and handle performance management issues

• Deep technical knowledge of distributed systems and data-intensive systems, such as data processing engines, query engines, or database internals

• Enough hands-on depth in Python and performance-sensitive systems code to review designs and work through performance and stability problems alongside the team

• A great track record of execution, with a sense of urgency and excellent prioritization skills

• Effective written and verbal communication with engineers, customers, and an open source community

Nice to Have

• Experience leading or maintaining a widely used open source project, including working with external contributors and project governance

• Hands-on experience with Ray, Spark, Flink, Beam or similar engines

• Experience with Apache Arrow, columnar formats, or table formats such as Iceberg and Delta Lake

• Experience with GPU workloads, LLM or multimodal batch inference, or data loading for large-scale model training

• Experience operating data or ML infrastructure in production

Compensation

We believe in transparent pay practices. The anticipated base salary range for this role is $267,000 - $375,000. Final salary depends on experience, relevant skills, qualifications, and market considerations. In addition to base pay, eligible employees receive equity awards and enjoy a comprehensive benefits package designed to support their health, well-being, and financial future.

Why Anyscale

• We're on a mission to make scalable computing effortless. Ray is the AI Compute Engine at the center of some of the world's most powerful AI platforms

• Our tech is in production at companies like OpenAI, Uber, Spotify, Instacart, and Cruise

• We're backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Addition, with $250M+ raised to date

• Recent partnerships with Azure, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud are putting AI-native compute directly into enterprise environments

• Competitive salary and equity, plus health/dental/vision coverage (many plans up to 99% employer-covered)

• We offer flexible time off, paid parental leave, and mental health support

Anyscale Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Candidates are evaluated without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law.

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