Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Justworks; New York (NY); On-site; USD 240,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Great benefits

Wellness program offerings

Company retreats

Job summary

Justworks seeks an experienced engineering leader to manage their data platform based in New York City. This role requires a strong background in data engineering and leading multi-team organizations.

The ideal candidate will have at least 10 years of experience, especially with modern PaaS data stack technologies, primarily Snowflake. Key responsibilities include setting technical direction for the data platform and driving operational excellence.

The compensation range for this position is $240,000 to $310,000 per year, dependent on experience.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 5 years of hands-on experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience.
• Strong expertise in data governance and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Own and direct the technical direction of the data platform.
• Lead architectural decisions and operational excellence.
• Recruit and develop a team of data engineers.

Skills

Deep Snowflake expertise

SQL proficiency

Python development

Architectural judgment

Tools

Snowflake

Fivetran

Airflow

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Who We Are

At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset – our people. We help businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues, are data‑driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment and build something meaningful while having fun, we’d love to hear from you. We’re united by shared goals and motivations. Our values are reflected in our product and our team.

Department

Technology, Data & AI

About The Team

The Data & Analytics team is Justworks' data and AI center of excellence – a connected set of functions spanning business intelligence, data science, analytics engineering, platform data/ML engineering and AI builders. We’ve grown significantly over the last several years and continue to build momentum across the business, leveling up maturity in how we deliver insights, govern data, and enable the company to make better decisions. You'll find a highly collaborative & diverse group motivated by craft, shared learning, and a genuine commitment to growing our impact for customers while evolving how we work together for our people. Come build with us! The Data Platform Engineering team sits at the core of this foundation, owning the pipelines, platform infrastructure, and reliability that every other DNA function depends on.

Who You Are

You're a hands‑on engineering leader with deep experience building and operating modern data platforms. You’ve led teams through scale – evolving architecture, improving reliability, and making hard trade‑offs between speed, cost, and quality. You’re as comfortable reviewing a PR or debugging a pipeline failure as you are setting quarterly roadmap priorities or presenting a platform strategy to senior leadership. You think in systems – how pipelines, orchestration, governance, and observability connect to produce a trustworthy platform – and you know how to build a team that operates with both craft and urgency. You develop engineers, set a high technical bar, and create an environment where people grow. You bring strong opinions grounded in experience with modern PaaS data stack technologies – Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt, Estuary – and you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t at scale. Snowflake is core to how we operate and you should have depth there. Reporting to the VP of Data & Analytics, you’ll lead the data platform organization, setting technical direction, driving operational excellence, and ensuring the platform is reliable, scalable, and built to support the company’s growth.

Platform Leadership & Technical Direction

• Own the technical direction of Justworks' core data platform – pipelines, infrastructure, orchestration, and standards that keep it trustworthy
• Lead architectural decisions on cloud data infrastructure, balancing scalability, cost, reliability, and security
• Drive operational excellence across the platform – observability, data quality, cost optimization, incident management, and SLAs
• Set and enforce engineering standards – testing, documentation, CI/CD, and code review best practices
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure as code, ensuring the platform is auditable, repeatable, and resilient

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead and develop a team of data engineers, including direct line managers and individual contributors at various levels
• Set a high bar for engineering craft – mentor engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Recruit and hire high‑caliber data engineers as the platform team grows
• Create an environment where engineers develop their skills, take ownership, and do the best work of their careers

Cross‑Functional Partnership & Delivery

• Partner with DNA functional teams (e.g., Analytics Engineering, BI, Data Science) and distributed Data Engineering teams to ensure the platform serves the full breadth of organizational needs
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to align on data contracts, security, compliance, and shared infrastructure
• Drive planning processes that connect platform priorities to DNA’s overall strategy and enterprise OKRs

How You Will Do Your Work

• Plans & Aligns – Ensures individual actions support company mission; communicates effectively; understands urgency and plans accordingly
• Balances Stakeholders – Understands internal and external stakeholder requirements, expectations, and needs and acts fairly despite conflicting demands
• Influence and Leadership – Fosters a community of knowledge‑sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward‑thinking across the organization
• Manages Complexity – Makes sense of complex, high‑quantity, and sometimes contradictory information to effectively solve problems
• Good Judgment – Pauses before acting; asks questions to fully understand context; applies critical thinking and takes ownership of outcomes
• Teamwork & Communication – Honors diverse thoughts and opinions; leverages unique skills to maximize efficiency
• Skills and Knowledge – Continuously learns and applies domain knowledge, best practices, and new technologies to improve the platform

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in data engineering, with at least 5 years working hands‑on with modern PaaS data stack technologies (Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt, Estuary, or equivalent)
• Deep Snowflake expertise – schema design, query optimization, cost governance, data sharing, and performance tuning at scale
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including managing managers or leading a multi‑team engineering organization
• Strong architectural judgment – able to make sound decisions on pipeline design, infrastructure patterns, and platform evolution
• Experience leading a distributed engineering team across multiple workstreams and delivery tracks
• Deep proficiency in SQL and Python; recognized by peers for technical rigor
• Strong expertise with AWS services (S3, Lambda, Fargate, Redshift, Kinesis) and infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Strong experience with data governance, security, and compliance in a production environment
• Excellent communicator – able to engage technical and non‑technical stakeholders, present platform strategy to senior leadership, and translate infrastructure investments into business terms
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving work forward in a fast‑moving environment
• Point of view on how AI is changing data platform engineering – both in how the team works and what the platform enables

Nice to have

• Experience building data platforms that support ML/AI workloads (feature stores, model pipelines, vector stores)
• Background in a regulated or compliance‑sensitive environment (fintech, HR tech, healthcare)
• Experience with streaming/CDC technologies (Estuary, Kafka, Debezium)

Technologies Used

• Languages: Python, SQL, Terraform
• Data & Analytics: Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran
• Streaming & CDC: Estuary
• Workflow Orchestration: Airflow, MWAA
• Cloud: AWS (S3, Lambda, Fargate, Redshift, Kinesis, Step Functions, EventBridge)
• Observability & Monitoring: Datadog
• CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions

Compensation

Base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is $240,000.00 - $310,000.00 per year. Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location. Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the local cost of labor.

Diversity & Inclusion

Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all customers. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons in compliance with applicable laws. If you’re in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at [e-mail].