Senior Manager, Data Engineering

600 UMG Recordings Inc; New York (NY); On-site; USD 121,500 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental and vision coverage

Mental health coverage (outpatient)

Fertility coverage

Wellbeing reimbursements

Student loan repayment assistance

401(k) with employer contribution

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Universal Music Group is seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineering Manager to lead a team delivering enterprise‑grade data products and AI‑ready data assets. You will design scalable pipelines and architectures that support commerce analytics, ML workloads, and AI use cases.

You will collaborate with Ecommerce, Product, Growth, Finance, and Data Science to enable feature stores and model‑ready datasets while guiding governance, data quality, and platform reliability for AI initiatives.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, with 3+ years in a leadership role and direct ownership of ecommerce, digital commerce, DTC, retail or marketplace data domains.
• Deep knowledge of modern data architectures (lakehouse, real‑time streaming, batch processing).
• Strong understanding of data modeling, including dimensional modeling and semantic layer design.
• Proven leadership delivering AI‑ready data platforms and ML/AI workflows, including feature stores and model‑data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of data engineers delivering enterprise‑grade data products and AI‑ready data assets.
• Design and deliver scalable data pipelines and architectures supporting analytics and ML workloads.
• Partner with Ecommerce, Product, Growth/Marketing, Finance, and Data Science stakeholders to enable AI use cases and feature stores.
• Champion data quality, governance, lineage, and contracts for AI data foundations.
• Oversee semantic layer development and enterprise data documentation for AI and analytics use.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

Cloud data architectures

Spark

Snowflake

Databricks

AI data readiness

Stakeholder management

Data governance

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Job Overview

We are UMG, the Universal Music Group – the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship, operating a broad array of businesses across recorded music, publishing, merchandising and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We are seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineering Manager – Enterprise Data Products to join our Global Data & Analytics team.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of data engineers delivering enterprise‑grade data products, data marts and AI‑ready data assets.
• Lead the strategic design and delivery of scalable data pipelines and architectures that support commerce analytics, machine learning and AI workloads.
• Partner with Ecommerce, Product, Growth/Marketing, Finance, and Data Science stakeholders to enable AI use cases, feature stores and model‑ready commerce datasets.
• Champion engineering best practices for AI‑ready data foundations, including data quality, completeness, consistency, lineage, customer identity resolution and trusted order/product/customer domains.
• Lead the development and implementation of semantic layers that standardize business definitions.
• Ensure enterprise data is structured and documented to support large language models, knowledge graphs, personalization, forecasting and downstream AI applications.
• Own platform reliability, including SLAs, monitoring, observability and incident management for ecommerce analytics and AI data pipelines.
• Lead the implementation and enforcement of data contracts and schema governance to improve stability and usability for AI and analytics consumers.
• Lead the adoption of modern data architecture patterns (lakehouse, real‑time streaming, batch processing, feature stores, data monitoring and observability).
• Guide platform optimization for performance, scalability, freshness and cost while supporting high‑volume ecommerce data and compute‑intensive AI workloads.
• Collaborate with governance teams to ensure data is discoverable, explainable and compliant, especially for AI use cases.
• Mentor and develop engineering talent, fostering expertise in data engineering and AI data readiness principles.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, with 3+ years in a leadership role and direct ownership of ecommerce, digital commerce, DTC, retail or marketplace data domains.
• Deep knowledge of modern data architectures (lakehouse, real‑time streaming, batch processing).
• Strong understanding of data modeling, including dimensional modeling, feature engineering and semantic layer design.
• Proven leadership experience delivering AI‑ready data platforms and ML/AI workflows, including feature stores, training datasets, model‑data pipelines, personalization, demand forecasting, churn/retention, attribution and other generative AI initiatives.
• Experience driving data quality, governance and observability frameworks critical for AI trust and explainability.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business, ecommerce, analytics and AI requirements into scalable data engineering solutions.
• Strategic exposure to AdTech and MarTech, with experience in the music/entertainment industry preferred and the ability to connect audience engagement, marketing technology and data‑driven growth initiatives.
• Experience with cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure or GCP) and big data technologies (Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.). GCP is a strong plus.
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management and cross‑functional collaboration skills.
• Awareness of data governance and privacy principles, including customer data privacy.
• Ability to lead effectively in a fast‑paced environment, balancing priorities while maintaining quality, stakeholder alignment and delivery discipline.
• Ability to lead the creation of impactful executive presentations that communicate strategy, trade‑offs, roadmap decisions and measurable business outcomes.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage.
• 100% coverage for outpatient in‑network mental health services.
• Fertility coverage for eligible medical plan participants.
• Wellbeing reimbursements for fitness classes, spa treatments, meal services, travel etc. (up to $720/year).
• Student loan repayment assistance and tuition reimbursement.
• 401(k) with 100% immediate vesting on the first 5% of your contributions, plus an additional UMG contribution.
• Flexible paid time off (PTO): 3‑weeks PTO for exempt employees, 2‑weeks paid winter break, 10 company holidays (including Juneteenth and Wellbeing Day), summer Fridays (between Memorial Day and Labor Day), generous paid parental leave for every type of parent.

Legal & Employment Statement

Universal Music Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are an E‑Verify employer in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah. UMG is not enrolled in E‑Verify in California and New York, and cannot support employment of candidates whose employer must enroll in E‑Verify (for example, candidates on STEM‑OPT). The job category is Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence. Salary range: $121,500–$200,000, subject to a variety of factors including qualifications, experience, skills and location. This job description only provides an overview of job responsibilities that are subject to change.