Senior Manager, Data Engineering New Washington, DC

The Nuclear Company; Washington, Northern (District of Columbia, KY); Hybrid; USD 179,000 - 203,000; Full time

Job summary

The Nuclear Company is seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to build and operate our first centralized data platform. Reporting to the Head of Product Engineering, you will lead a team of data engineers, design data models, pipelines, and governance, and own production quality and cost management.

This role blends hands-on engineering with strategic leadership in a fast-growing, AI-driven energy company.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree plus 8 years in data engineering, with at least 3 years leading engineers.
• Experience designing and operating production data platforms in cloud.
• Strong mentoring and staff development experience.
• Proficient in SQL and Python.
• Knowledge of distributed processing, batch/streaming.
• Experience with infrastructure as code for data systems.
• Ability to communicate with non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with data quality and observability tooling.
• Experience managing cloud costs.

Responsibilities

• Make engineering decisions to realize platform strategy.
• Design data models, select tooling, design pipelines.
• Lead deployment and technical standards for the team.
• Recruit, supervise, and develop data engineers.
• Ensure data quality, tests, lineage, and monitoring.
• Manage platform cloud spend and cost-performance balance.

Skills

SQL

Python

Cloud

Data modeling

Data pipelines

Data quality

Observability

Infrastructure as code

Mentoring

Stakeholder comms

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Prefect

dbt

Iceberg

Terraform

CloudFormation

GitHub Actions

Kafka

Palantir

AWS

Job description

The Nuclear Company is the fastest growing AI tech-enabled startup in the nuclear and energy space, pioneering a fleet-scale approach to building the next generation of nuclear reactors. Through our design-once, build-many model, we're accelerating the deployment of safe, reliable, and affordable nuclear energy.

We operate with an AI-first mindset.Every employee is expected to leverage AI, technology, and the Nuclear Operating System (NOS) as integral components of their role to improve the quality, speed, and impact of their work. We expect every team member to continuously identify opportunities to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, improve processes, and contribute to the ongoing evolution of NOS as a strategic operating capability that enables The Nuclear Company to scale with excellence.

We hire people who are driven by purpose, thrive in ambiguity, and are energized by building what has never been built before. Our team combines intellectual curiosity with high agency, embraces candid feedback and continuous learning, and holds themselves and others to exceptional standards. Our values, Transparency, Responsibility, Unity, Scrappy, and Tenacity, guide how we hire, collaborate, and make decisions every day. They are not words on a wall; they are the standard by which we operate. TRUST is the foundation of our safety culture, fostering intellectual honesty, accountability, and open communication, while our values challenge every team member to execute with urgency, humility, resilience, and an unwavering commitment to our mission.

About the role

The Senior Manager, Data Engineering is responsible for the technical implementation of TNC's data engineering platform. Reporting to the Head of Product Engineering, the Senior Manager translates the company’s strategy into working systems and leads the engineering team that builds and operates them. Because TNC does not currently maintain a single centralized data platform, the Senior Manager will construct this capability from the ground up, and is accountable for the detailed technical design, delivery, quality, and ongoing operation of everything that is built.

Responsibilities

The Senior Manager makes the engineering decisions required to realize the platform strategy, including detailed data model design, tooling selection, pipeline design, deployment approach, and the technical standards the team works to. They sequence and manage delivery so that our teams permitting and building nuclear power plants receive the data they need to succeed. In the early phases of the role they will personally develop production pipelines, and will convert that work into the reusable components, testing standards, and code review practices the broader team adopts.

The Senior Manager recruits, supervises, and develops a team of data engineers proportional to TNC’s needs. They set performance expectations, conduct career development conversations, and are accountable for the team's delivery and technical quality. They implement and enforce data quality practices including automated testing, data contracts, lineage tracking, and monitoring, and are responsible for implementing the access control, personally identifiable information handling, retention, and audit requirements defined for all data at TNC. The Senior Manager manages the platform's cloud expenditure against an established budget and identifies opportunities to improve the balance of cost and performance.

The Senior Manager works closely with staff across TNC's business units to gather requirements, translate them into technical specifications, and advise stakeholders when a proposed approach is unlikely to achieve the intended outcome. TNC is seeking a candidate with demonstrated depth in modern data platform engineering; experience with the specific technologies listed under Desired Qualifications is welcomed but is not required for this position.

Required Experience

• Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 8 years related work experience or equivalent combination of education and work experience, including a minimum of 3 years supervising data engineers.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production data platforms in a cloud environment.
• Experience supervising, mentoring, and developing engineering staff.
• Experience with SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language (e.g. Python).
• Knowledge of distributed data processing, data modeling, and the operational characteristics of batch and streaming systems.
• Love Claude Code/agentic software creation while understanding the criticality of test development.
• Experience deploying infrastructure through code and applying software development practices including version control, code review, and automated testing to data systems.
• Experience communicating technical concepts and tradeoffs to non-technical audiences.
• Experience with data quality and observability tooling.
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure costs.

Preferred Experience

• Experience establishing data infrastructure where limited or no prior capability existed.
• Experience advising on how to construct data structures for long term flexibility and performance.
• Experience with Amazon Web Services data services.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect.
• Experience with data transformation and modeling tools such as dbt, and with lakehouse table formats such as Iceberg.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and continuous integration tools such as Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation, or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with streaming platforms such as Kafka, Flink, or Spark Structured Streaming.
• Experience working with geospatial data.
• Experience with Palantir.
• Self-starting, independent worker who can collaborate effectively in a team, and thrive in a decentralized organization with minimal oversight.
• Competitive compensation packages
• 401k with company match

Estimated Starting Salary Range

The estimated starting salary range for this role is $179,000 - $203,000 annually less applicable withholdings and deductions, paid on a bi-weekly basis. The actual salary offered may vary based on relevant factors as determined in the Company’s discretion, which may include experience, qualifications, tenure, skill set, availability of qualified candidates, geographic location, certifications held, and other criteria deemed pertinent to the particular role.

EEO Statement

The Nuclear Company is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an environment of inclusion in the workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We prohibit discrimination in all aspects of employment, including hiring, promotion, demotion, transfer, compensation, and termination.

Export Control

Certain positions at The Nuclear Company may involve access to information and technology subject to export controls under U.S. law. Compliance with these export controls may result in The Nuclear Company limiting its consideration of certain applicants.