SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Catawiki is a curated marketplace for special objects, auctioning over 100,000 unique items weekly across 80+ categories. The company has sold over 25 million objects and operates globally with 800+ employees across 60+ nationalities.
As Senior Manager of Data Engineering & Machine Learning, you will lead an established team of eight Data Engineers and ML specialists based in Amsterdam and Lisbon. You'll drive the technical direction of the team while managing their growth and development, reporting to the SVP Engineering and joining the Engineering Management team.
Key responsibilities include:
**Team Leadership & Development**: Set technical direction, coach experienced specialists, create clear ownership across both disciplines, and develop team members' careers.
**Data Foundations**: Improve data pipelines, integrations and infrastructure that support analysis, reporting and machine learning across the organization.
**Production ML Operations**: Strengthen deployment, monitoring and operational reliability of production models so teams can run them effectively and resolve issues quickly.
**Marketplace ML**: Partner with product teams to improve recommendation engines, cancellation prediction and bidder-risk models, connecting model performance to business outcomes.
**Strategic Priorities**: Work with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders to identify high-value problems, balance delivery with reliability, and maintain long-term platform health.
**Technology Strategy**: Contribute to the broader Engineering department's direction as part of the management team.
Current platform priorities include modernizing infrastructure for serving production models, introducing a feature store for improved feature management, and strengthening observability and cost controls.
The role is hybrid, requiring a minimum of two days per week in the Amsterdam office. The team has no on-call rotation and works closely with cross-functional stakeholders.
**Requirements:**
- Deep technical experience in either Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering, with practical knowledge of the other discipline
- Proven experience leading experienced engineers or ML specialists, with ability to coach growth and set clear expectations
- Strong architecture and systems thinking skills; ability to evaluate trade-offs and guide data platform and distributed systems design
- Hands-on experience with deployment, monitoring and operation of machine learning systems in production
- Ability to connect technical work to business goals, make priority decisions and assess outcomes
- Cloud platform experience (GCP with BigQuery, Vertex AI, Kubernetes preferred; AWS equivalent experience also relevant)
- Experience with streaming and data integration (Kafka, event-driven systems, modern integration tools)
- Excellent communication skills; ability to explain technical trade-offs and align technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Familiarity with Catawiki's current stack is useful but equivalent experience with other platforms is welcome
