Manager, Data Management & Operations

CHAOS Industries•El Segundo, CA

21h•$246,000 - $339,000•Onsite

About The Position

CHAOS Industries is seeking a Manager of Data Management & Operations to build and lead the company’s data operating model as it scales. Data is foundational to developing, testing, and improving complex sensing systems, and this role will make information consistent, trusted, secure, and usable across Engineering, AI, Test, and business teams. The manager will own the end-to-end data lifecycle, including how data is defined, collected, transported, governed, transformed, secured, and delivered for analysis. This technical and operational leadership position spans data governance, data-platform coordination, and test operations. The manager will lead data management and field data operations functions and partner closely with the Foundry engineering team to ensure the platform meets company needs. The role is based full-time on-site at CHAOS Industries’ El Segundo, California headquarters, with regular travel to test sites and other company locations. The position may require support for critical test events and field operations outside standard business hours. Success means teams use consistent definitions, analysts receive trusted datasets, test data is captured and made available quickly, and access to sensitive data is controlled and auditable without hindering execution.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience across data engineering, data platforms, data governance, analytics infrastructure, test data, or similarly complex technical environments, including significant team leadership.
At least 1 year of management experience; prior management of teams that include non-exempt or contract employees is ideal.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
Demonstrated ownership of production data pipelines from source ingestion through transformation, quality assurance, publication, and consumption.
Strong knowledge of ETL, data modeling, metadata, lineage, data quality, observability, and modern data engineering practices.
Strong cross-functional leadership and communication skills, including the ability to turn ambiguous needs into clear standards, systems, and operating processes.
Ability to work across data engineering, radar and test teams, security stakeholders, analysts, and senior leadership.
Ability to establish governance that creates clarity and trust without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Willingness to work closely with field operations and understand the practical realities of collecting, moving, and validating data.
Ability to thrive in a high-execution environment with evolving requirements and expected ownership.
Strong technical judgment, practical prioritization, and ability to make tradeoffs across platform, operations, and compliance.
Interest in building teams, systems, and operating rhythms from the ground up.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Palantir Foundry or a comparable enterprise data platform; deep Foundry experience is strongly preferred.
Radar or defense systems experience.
Experience planning or supporting test events and coordinating the operational logistics needed to reliably collect and transport data.
Experience designing permissions and access-control processes in environments with significant security, compliance, audit, or data-handling requirements.
Experience supporting data collection from physical systems, sensors, laboratories, manufacturing, or field testing.

Responsibilities

Establish company-wide governance for data definitions, ownership, quality, lineage, retention, and calculation change management.
Create authoritative, documented analytical datasets and shared definitions so teams can use consistent data and metrics.
Work with the Foundry engineering team to align data ingestion, ETL, modeling, transformation, validation, and monitoring with stakeholder needs.
Own permissions management and partner with Security and Compliance to implement least-privilege access, auditability, retention, and sensitive-data handling controls.
Build a repeatable process for planning data capture at test events, covering required sensor data, metadata, truth data, labels, logging, storage, and validation.
Coordinate across teams to translate test objectives into clear data requirements and ensure collection systems are ready before testing begins.
Establish pre-test readiness and post-test reconciliation processes to ensure required data is captured, validated, transferred, cataloged, and available for analysis.
Use test outcomes and data gaps to improve collection methods, retention strategy, data quality controls, and underlying data architecture.
Build and manage teams responsible for data governance and field data operations, while establishing an effective partnership with the Foundry engineering team.
Sustain data operations at CHAOS test sites, including contributing to test schedule strategy, extraction technology and logistics, and data labeling.
Create operating procedures, ownership models, service levels, and metrics for pipeline reliability, test data capture, and data availability.
Partner with Foundry engineering to balance immediate test and program needs with long-term investments in scalable architecture, automation, and team capability.
Work full-time on-site at the El Segundo, California headquarters.
Travel regularly to CHAOS test sites and other company locations.
Support critical test events and field operations outside standard business hours when needed.