Senior Manager, Data Engineering

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’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you. We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team. Our Values If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.Department Technology, Data & Analytics 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 tradeoffs 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. Your Success Profile What You Will Work On Platform Leadership & Technical Direction Own the technical direction of Justworks' core data platform — pipelines, infrastructure, orchestration, and the 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 org 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 As a Sr. Manager, Data Platform Engineering,, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately results in our success as an organization. In this role, your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal attributes are anchored in the following competencies: 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 of stakeholders. Influence and Leadership - fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking across the organization. Manages Complexity - Making 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 - the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve. In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for: Camaraderie - Day to day y