Manager, Data Engineering and AI-Ready Data Enablement

American Century Investments • Kansas City, MO

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

American Century Investments is hiring a Manager, Data Engineering and AI-Ready Data Enablement to lead development and operations for an Enterprise Data Technology team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on data engineering and data enablement—not machine learning model development or ML engineering. The manager will provide technical guidance across data engineering, data platforms, and AI-ready data products enriched with semantics and business context; contribute to technical design and architecture decisions; review engineering approaches; help solve complex data challenges; and mentor and develop the team. The role works closely with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development and consumption of trusted, AI-ready data products, while contributing to the organization’s evolution toward a data-driven culture. It reports to the Director - Data Technologies and is hybrid, based in either Kansas City, Missouri, or Southlake (DFW), Texas. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without visa sponsorship, now or in the future.

American Century Investments is a global asset manager with more than 65 years of experience. The company is privately owned and independent, focuses on investment management, and directs 40% of its dividends each year to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

The company offers competitive compensation with a bonus plan, generous PTO and competitive benefits, a 401(k) with a 5% company match plus an annual performance-based discretionary contribution, tuition reimbursement, a formal mentorship program, and live and online learning. Employees must be in the office at a scheduled frequency, and adherence to that schedule is essential to the role.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent relevant work experience.
• At least 7 years of progressive hands-on engineering experience implementing data engineering solutions and data platforms, such as ETL, ELT, data lakes, and cloud data warehouses.
• At least 2 years of experience leading engineers through people management, technical leadership, or a combination of both.
• Hands-on experience building AI-ready data products by combining data engineering with semantic modeling, metadata, and business context, including developing or implementing an enterprise semantic layer.
• Experience partnering with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development of data products through reusable patterns, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
• At least 5 years of experience using SDLC and Agile.
• 1–3 years of experience with AWS data services such as S3, Glue, Redshift, and EMR.
• 3–5 years of demonstrated experience with data movement, such as EMR and Glue.
• At least 5 years of validated experience with programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or C#.
• 1–3 years of DevOps experience with Git, build, artifact/package management, and deployment automation.
• Ability to work in a multifunctional team environment involving varied business units, vendors, countries, and cultures.
• Demonstrates American Century Investments’ Winning Behaviors: Client Focused, Courageous and Accountable, Collaborative, Curious and Adaptable, and Competitively Driven.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without visa sponsorship, now or in the future.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with SQL, relational databases, and data modeling.
• AWS certification.
• Experience designing, deploying, and supporting production cloud services in the AWS ecosystem, including EC2, EMR, and Glue.
• Ability to develop business, technical, and application architecture.
• Architecture experience with event-driven design, APIs, microservices, and stateless/chaos approaches.
• Experience with financial product datasets.
• Familiarity with data discovery, analytics, and BI tools such as Tableau.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and operations for an Enterprise Data Technology team.
• Provide engineering guidance, contribute to technical design and architecture decisions, review engineering approaches, and help resolve complex data challenges while leading and developing the team.
• Build and maintain an enterprise data ecosystem for ingestion, storage, organization, and interfaces, including scalable data engineering pipelines and platforms that support trusted, AI-ready data products.
• Analyze business and technical requirements for data systems and applications; scope, estimate, and schedule project work; and coordinate integration of IT policies, procedures, and development practices.
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements, including automation of manual processes, optimization of data delivery, and infrastructure redesign for scalability.
• Research emerging data engineering, data platform, and semantic technologies to improve development and enablement of AI-ready data products.
• Lead development of AI-ready data products enriched with metadata, business definitions, relationships, and context; build reusable semantic models and contribute to an enterprise semantic layer for consistent interpretation across analytics and AI use cases.
• Partner with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development and consumption of AI-ready data products through reusable engineering patterns, semantic modeling guidance, tooling, and hands-on support while maintaining data quality, governance, and secure access.
• Mentor and guide team members toward empowered delivery and professional growth.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with bonus plan.
• Generous PTO and competitive benefits.
• 401(k) with 5% company match plus annual performance-based discretionary contribution.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Formal mentorship program.
• Live and online learning.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager