Engineering Manager, Data Streaming
About The Position
The Platform Engineering Manager leads the Data Streaming team, a specialized group of platform and reliability engineers responsible for building and operating Braze’s managed data streaming platform. Powered by Kafka, Kafka Streams, and Apache Flink, the platform aims to make data streaming a solved problem, allowing internal product teams to ship streaming features without managing the underlying infrastructure. This role combines technical leadership, engineering management, and product ownership to deliver reliable, low-friction platform services that minimize cognitive load for internal consumers. Treating the platform as a product, the manager owns the long-term vision, gathers requirements from internal engineering teams, and drives adoption through clean, "paved-road" interfaces. Success is measured by how seamlessly consuming teams can deploy features rather than simple feature counts. Additionally, the manager partners closely with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to embed reliability practices into the stack, establish clear SLIs/SLOs, and ensure production and retrieval paths remain healthy as the platform scales globally.
Requirements
- 5 + years of increasing responsibility in platform engineering or infrastructure, including experience managing and mentoring engineering teams.
- A strong track record of owning and delivering infrastructure services that drive significant business value.
- Strong working knowledge of distributed, event-driven systems like Kafka (Connect/Streams) and Apache Flink to effectively guide architectural and reliability trade-offs.
- Hands-on experience building and scaling internal platforms using cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines.
- Exceptional relationship-building skills to align engineering teams, leadership, SREs, and internal consumers toward shared operational goals.
- Passionate about reducing cognitive load for internal developers and building high-value, self-service streaming services.
- High level of accountability for reliability, paired with a forward-thinking drive to continuously improve platform capabilities and developer experience.
Responsibilities
- Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of streaming platform and reliability engineers while fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture.
- Treat the streaming platform as a product by defining capabilities based on consumer needs, and driving adoption via self-service, "paved-road" interfaces.
- Engage internal engineering consumers to gather requirements, prioritize initiatives by business impact, and align roadmaps with the broader Data Platforms vision.
- Provide technical guidance on architecture, scalability, and system design across the Kafka stack, connector frameworks, and stream-processing engines.
- Champion automation, observability, infrastructure-as-code, secure design, and strict data governance (schemas, retention, and SLAs).
- Partner with SRE leadership to align platform reliability with SLOs, collaborate on proactive monitoring, and foster operational excellence.
- Implement automated policies, guidance, and defaults to eliminate manual, per-team operational labor.
- Lead incident response and post-mortems, feeding key operational learnings back into hardening the platform.
- Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and healthy data paths as the streaming infrastructure scales globally.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation that may include equity
- Retirement and Employee Stock Purchase Plans
- Flexible paid time off
- Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability
- Family services that include fertility benefits and equal paid parental leave
- Professional development supported by formal career pathing, learning platforms, and a yearly learning stipend
- A curated in-office employee experience, designed to foster community, team connections, and innovation
- Opportunities to give back to your community, including an annual company-wide Volunteer Week and donation matching
- Employee Resource Groups that provide supportive communities within Braze
- Collaborative, transparent, and fun culture recognized as a Great Place to Work®
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
Education Level
No Education Listed
