Data Engineering Manager

About the Role

As the Data Engineering Manager on the Core Data Engineering team, you'll lead the team responsible for integrating customers onto Afresh's platform and continuously improving the processes and code that make those integrations faster and more reliable. Your team will also build core dataflows that power new Afresh products as they launch.

This means owning the full lifecycle of customer data integrations: from raw data ingestion through transformation and delivery to downstream product and ML teams, across both new and existing grocery customers. Afresh's customer base is growing fast! We want to integrate customers across all of our products quickly and reliably. You'll drive integration execution, integration velocity, improve data quality and pipeline reliability, and build tooling and processes that make this process seamless.

This is a hands-on management role. You'll be deeply involved in technical decisions while also coaching your team, managing execution across multiple customer projects, and collaborating closely with Solutions Engineering, Product, and other engineering teams.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team of data engineers, providing mentorship, technical guidance, and career development support.
• Own execution of customer integrations across multiple product lines (Store Ordering, RecsAPI, DC, Production Planning, and more), ensuring integrations are delivered on time and at a high quality bar.
• Build core dataflows that power new Afresh products, working closely with Product and ML teams to understand requirements and deliver reliable data foundations.
• Drive integration velocity: improve the speed and predictability of getting new customers from raw data landing to production-ready, leveraging AI tooling, standardized architecture, and strong contractor enablement.
• Continuously improve integration processes and shared code: identify patterns across customer integrations and invest in abstractions, templates, and automation that reduce per-customer effort over time.
• Collaborate deeply with Solutions Engineers, Product Managers, and customer-facing teams to scope integration work, unblock dependencies, communicate progress, and ensure integrations meet our customers’ needs.
• Improve data quality and pipeline reliability by investing in better alerting, self-healing patterns, and resilience to messy or incomplete customer data.
• Champion AI-forward engineering practices: evaluate and adopt AI tools and agentic workflows that accelerate development, automate repetitive tasks, and push the team to the bleeding edge of modern data engineering.
• Contribute technically: reviewing code and architecture decisions, pairing with engineers on complex problems, and staying close to the work.

What Makes You a Great Fit

We encourage all highly-qualified candidates to apply, even if they don't meet every listed qualification.

• 3+ years of engineering management experience
• Strong technical background in data engineering: experience with Python, PySpark, SQL, dbt, Airflow, and modern data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar).
• Track record of shipping high-quality data integrations or ETL systems at scale, and a deep understanding of what makes data pipelines reliable.
• Experience managing execution across multiple concurrent projects with different customers or stakeholders, balancing competing priorities with clear communication.
• Demonstrated ability to improve team velocity through better tooling, process improvements, or automation.
• Genuine enthusiasm for AI-augmented engineering workflows. You've experimented with AI coding tools, agentic workflows, or similar approaches, and you have a vision for how they can transform data engineering and uplevel the team.
• Comfort working with messy, real-world data from enterprise customers, and the pragmatism to ship solutions that work without over-engineering.
• Strong collaboration skills: you're effective working across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams in a fast-paced environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience in grocery, retail, or supply chain data domains.
• Prior experience at a high-growth startup navigating rapid customer expansion.

Our Tech Stack

• Python, PySpark, dbt
• Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog)
• Astronomer (Airflow) for orchestration
• Claude, GitHub, Shortcut, Notion for development workflows

Why Work Here

• We are a mission-driven company that reduces millions of pounds of food waste (and growing!) in grocery stores every year.
• Work on challenging, real-world data problems that have a direct and visible impact on customers.
• Be part of an engineering culture that's genuinely AI-forward. We want to be on the bleeding edge.
• Lead a team at a pivotal inflection point: rapid customer growth means your work directly shapes how Afresh scales.
• Collaborative, supportive environment & awesome people :)

This position is not eligible for company sponsorship.

Salary Range in U.S.: $ 179,469 - $242,811