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Staffbase is an AI-native Employee Experience Platform company (unicorn valued at $1B+) with 550+ employees serving 1,500+ customers across 14 million employees globally. Headquartered in Chemnitz with offices in Berlin, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Prague, and Minneapolis–St. Paul.
You will lead a team of 4–5 data engineers as an Engineering Manager, operating as a hands-on technical player-coach rather than a traditional manager. This role bridges platform and product delivery: your team maintains and evolves a self-service data platform while delivering as a product team. You will own team roadmap sequencing, negotiate priorities with product stakeholders, and provide the technical depth to mentor engineers daily.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and develop 4–5 engineers through coaching, unblocking delivery, and building a product-minded data engineering culture
- Own roadmap sequencing and negotiate priorities with product stakeholders, pushing back where needed
- Balance platform and product demands as the team operates across both simultaneously
- Bring hands-on data streaming experience to guide the team through an active transition
- Raise the bar on data modeling across the team
- Drive cultural and technical shift toward distributed data ownership, helping product teams own their own data
- Collaborate with the broader staff engineering community on cross-cutting architectural decisions
- Build foundations for AI data governance, including guardrails, access control, and safety for AI agents interacting with data
You will work closely with the Director of Engineering and product stakeholders on sequencing, prioritization, and roadmap negotiation. While overall architecture direction is established for the near term, you will shape the details and influence technical direction as the roadmap extends into 2027 and beyond.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Proven experience at Staff Engineer level (or equivalent) in a data engineering context; you have been deep in technical work and now want to lead people
- Genuine player-coach mindset
- Strong stakeholder management skills; you thrive in negotiation, can push back confidently, and know how to reach workable compromises with product teams
- Solid data modeling skills and credibility to make it a team-wide standard
- Experience managing or developing engineers, coaching technical fundamentals and growing product thinking
- Strong communication skills and ability to drive cultural shift toward distributed, self-service data ownership
- Comfort operating across both platform and product delivery contexts
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with data governance for AI agents (guardrails, access control, safety considerations for agentic analytics)
- Familiarity with data lakes, semantic layers, and orchestration tooling at scale
- Experience in a product-led B2B SaaS environment
- Hands-on streaming experience (e.g., Kafka or Flink)
