Head of Data Platform & AI Data Foundations

Manifest OS; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Manifest OS is seeking a senior data platform architect to own the data platform, its architecture, reliability, and direction. You will lead the team that builds it, define the two-year target state, and ensure a trustworthy data foundation as the company scales.

You’ll report to the Director of Engineering and collaborate with Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Legal Ops. This is an on-site role at our NYC office, five days a week.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering, including serving as architect — not just contributor — of a cloud data platform.
• Deep hands-on fluency with BigQuery (or Snowflake/Databricks), dbt, Python, and advanced SQL.
• Real production experience: opinions on orchestration, idempotency, and testing come from being paged.
• Experience leading engineers formally or as a technical lead, with a player-coach mindset.
• Treats access control, PII handling, and auditability as core design requirements.

Responsibilities

• Own the target-state data architecture — ingestion, modeling, semantic layer, and serving — with a sequenced roadmap and named trade-offs.
• Drive build-vs-buy and tooling decisions across ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability.
• Own data trust: ensure freshness, correctness, and lineage observable; enforce CI standards.
• Maintain a single definitional layer so one metric means the same everywhere — BigQuery, HubSpot, dashboards.
• Build governed foundations for AI features, including identity resolution and canonical entity models.
• Lead and grow the team while staying close to the code to review hard designs and complex queries.

Skills

BigQuery

Snowflake/Databricks

dbt

Python

Advanced SQL

Job description

Manifest OS is seeking a senior data platform architect to own the data platform, its architecture, reliability, and direction. You will lead the team that builds it, define the two-year target state, and ensure a trustworthy data foundation as the company scales.

You’ll report to the Director of Engineering and collaborate with Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Legal Ops. This is an on-site role at our NYC office, five days a week.