Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Dropbox is a Virtual First company seeking a Senior Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for the reliability, quality, cost, and velocity of their core data platform. The role involves managing a team of data engineers and ensuring the development of robust data products while collaborating with various departments to enhance data accessibility and reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Data Quality & Observability: Establish and enforce a rigorous data quality culture: lineage, freshness monitoring, anomaly detection, and outcome-oriented, gaming-resistant quality metrics
• Self-Serve Platform: Lead the engineering of the self-serve analytics substrate, reducing bespoke request volume and increasing partner-team autonomy
• Cost & Efficiency: Own the unit economics of the data platform — compute and storage efficiency — and drive measurable improvements without sacrificing reliability
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner deeply with Data Science, BIE, Analytics, Product, Data Platform, and the CTO org to define the semantic layer, modeling standards, and data contracts that make downstream work trustworthy and fast
• Engineering Culture: Establish rigorous engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD for data, incident response, and postmortems — and champion the effective, measured use of AI coding tools to improve engineering productivity
• Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-talent-density team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous learning

Requirements:

• 8+ years of data engineering or backend/data infrastructure experience with increasing scope, ideally in high-scale environments
• 3+ years of experience directly managing and growing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team design
• Proven track record building and operating large-scale batch and streaming pipelines (e.g., Spark, dbt, Airflow/orchestration) on a modern lakehouse or warehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery)
• Demonstrated ownership of data SLAs, observability, lineage, and incident response for business-critical pipelines
• Strong data modeling fundamentals and the ability to design a semantic layer and data contracts that serve many downstream consumers
• Excellent communication and the ability to align engineering, data science, analytics, and business partners around shared reliability and quality goals
• Track record building self-serve data or analytics platforms that reduced bespoke request volume and increased partner autonomy
• Experience integrating AI coding tools and LLM-based tooling into the engineering workflow, with a measured approach to impact and guardrails
• Demonstrated success improving compute/storage unit economics without regressing reliability
• Familiarity with modern data governance, privacy, and access-control practices
• Experience operating in a pod or embedded model serving multiple business partners