Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Palmetto-Clean-Technology; Charlotte (NC); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Medical, Dental, and Vision

Parental leave

Retirement plans

Job summary

Palmetto seeks a senior data engineering leader to build and scale a data platform used by product teams, finance, operations, partners, and AI agents. You will own architecture, access controls, and data governance while aligning with company goals.

This player-coach role requires hands-on coding, design review, and mentoring to ensure reliable pipelines and compliant data for AI consumers, with strong collaboration across finance, operations, and product.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or data engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers.
• Experience designing enterprise data architectures and leading architecture reviews.
• Hands-on depth in a modern data warehouse and transformation framework; fluency in Python or another backend language.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a data engineering team; set expectations and career paths.
• Define roadmaps aligned with company objectives and deliver cross-team projects on time and budget.
• Own data architecture, governance, and secure access paths; ensure agent-ready data and traceability.

Skills

Data engineering

People management

Data architecture

SQL

Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Snowflake

BigQuery

dbt

Job description

Palmetto is a consumer energy platform that provides homeowners with a single destination to discover, purchase, finance, install, monitor and manage home energy products and services. By offering one integrated platform across solar, battery storage, HVAC, heat pumps and more, Palmetto helps homeowners make home energy more affordable, reliable and accessible. Today Palmetto serves hundreds of thousands of homeowners, across 30+ states, building the operating infrastructure for the consumer energy transition, one home at a time.

Our employees are our most valuable resource. We foster a promote-from-within culture that prioritizes talent development, career growth, and purpose-driven work. Palmetto offers a comprehensive benefits package—including unlimited PTO, medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid parental leave, retirement plans, and more—so you can have it all both personally and professionally. Palmetto prioritizes people, planet, and profit—backed by a culture that values collaboration, impact, and balance. Join us in building a brighter, cleaner world.

Location

This position will be remote based in the United States.

Reporting

This position will report to the VP, Engineering.

Summary of Role

You will lead the team that makes Palmetto's data usable by product teams, finance, operations, partners, and AI agents. Today much of our data lives in reporting dashboards. Your team builds the platform that lets products and AI tools use that data directly, with the right access controls, audit trails, and speed. The result is one consistent view of the whole customer journey, from sales and lending to installation, interconnection, and years of production data.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead a team of data engineers. You set priorities and hold the bar, and you stay close enough to the work to shape architecture, review designs, and write code when it helps. You are accountable for the platform's outcomes. Your team owns the technical design and build of the secure access path. AI agents are first-class users of our platform, and we build with agents ourselves.

Strategic & Tactical

• Lead and grow the team. Hire, develop, and retain strong data engineers. Set clear expectations, give honest feedback, and build career paths so no system depends on one person.
• Set direction and deliver. Set the roadmap in line with company objectives, weigh trade-offs openly, and be clear about what the team is not doing. Deliver cross-team projects on time and on budget.
• Own the data architecture. Set the target architecture for ingestion, modeling, the semantic layer, and governance. Review designs and write code when it helps.
• Own the platform outcomes. Be accountable for reliable pipelines with clear SLAs, one consistent set of metric definitions, and agent-ready data whose answers trace back to source.
• Direct the access path. Be accountable for the secure serving layer and APIs. Your team designs and builds them, and you set priorities and standards.
• Build governance in. Experience preparing governed data for AI consumers, with answers that trace back to their source.
• Manage vendors. Evaluate data platform and tooling vendors, negotiate and sign contracts within your approval limit, and keep warehouse and tooling costs in check.
• Partner across the company. Work with finance, operations, sales, marketing, and product to understand their evolving data needs, and bring concrete recommendations to business owners.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or data engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers.
• A record of hiring well, developing people, and building strong teams.
• Data Architect depth: you have designed enterprise data architecture (warehouse, modeling, lineage, governance) and led architecture reviews.
• Hands-on depth in a modern warehouse and transformation framework (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt) and SQL, with enough fluency in one backend language (e.g., Python) to review and contribute.
• Demonstrated agentic engineering beyond prompting: you use coding agents in your own work and have brought agentic practices to a team.
• Working knowledge of production APIs, authorization and access control, and PII handling.
• A record of delivering data platform projects that span multiple teams, including deciding what not to build.
• A history of building consensus with partners outside engineering, including finance, capital markets, and accounting.
• Experience preparing governed data for AI consumers, with answers that trace back to their source.
• Experience evaluating vendors and negotiating contracts.

Employment is contingent upon the successful completion of a background check.

Palmetto embraces diversity and is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

To ensure a fair evaluation, we may use AI to assist in sorting applications, but all final decisions are made by our hiring team and no candidate dispositions are automated. We will keep your information on file for four years from the date of your application. For detailed information about how we handle your data and our use of AI, please review our full privacy policy.