Manager, Data Platform Engineering

Strata Decision Technology•Chicago, IL

1d•$155,000 - $175,000•Onsite

About The Position

As the Manager of Data Platform Engineering, you will lead the platforms that power our data and analytics capabilities, with Snowflake at the center. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead a small team while personally designing, automating, operating, and troubleshooting critical platform components. You will own Snowflake architecture and operations across security, governance, administration, reliability, performance, and cost, while providing operational oversight for PostgreSQL.

Requirements

Deep hands-on Snowflake expertise across administration, security, performance, cost optimization, automation, and production architecture.
Strong SQL skills and demonstrated experience troubleshooting and optimizing complex data workloads.
Experience implementing least-privilege access, service identities, privileged access, credential management, access lifecycle controls, and auditing.
Strong AWS experience and an understanding of the cloud infrastructure and security concepts surrounding modern data platforms.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred), Python or similar automation languages, and Git-based CI/CD.
Experience working with dbt or similar modern data-transformation tooling.
Working knowledge of PostgreSQL or strong relational database fundamentals.
Experience supporting production systems and participating in incident response and operational troubleshooting.
Ability to set technical direction, implement solutions, and lead technical professionals.
Strong communication, collaboration, and influence across engineering teams.
Sound judgment balancing security, reliability, performance, cost, and productivity.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Satori or similar data access-management and security platforms.
Experience with legacy SQL Server environments.
Experience supporting data platforms used for analytics, machine learning, or AI workloads.
Experience moving manually administered infrastructure toward automated self-service.

Responsibilities

Own and Evolve the Data Platform: Own Snowflake architecture, roadmap, administration, and engineering standards. Configure and operate Snowflake compute, storage, networking, integrations, and platform services. Create reusable patterns, automation, and guardrails that enable teams to deliver safely and efficiently. Oversee AWS RDS PostgreSQL configuration, security, backup, and recovery for product applications.
Strengthen Security, Governance, and Access: Design and automate least-privilege security and access controls, including RBAC, service identities, credentials, privileged access, and the access lifecycle. Improve access-management tools, including Satori and internal solutions. Partner with Security and Infrastructure to align Snowflake and PostgreSQL with enterprise requirements. Improve auditability of platform access, administrative activity, and policy compliance.
Drive Performance and Cost Efficiency: Own Snowflake performance and cost management, optimizing warehouse sizing, workloads, concurrency, storage, and configuration. Diagnose complex query and workload performance issues with engineering teams. Implement monitoring, alerting, resource controls, cost attribution, and platform health metrics.
Build Automation and Engineering Practices: Use Infrastructure as Code, including Terraform, to make platform configuration repeatable, reviewable, and auditable. Build automation with SQL, Python, and APIs to reduce manual administration and improve reliability and self-service. Maintain Git-based CI/CD practices for platform configuration and deployment. Establish practical standards for dbt and related data-platform technologies. Maintain operational tooling, documentation, and runbooks.
Lead While Staying Hands-On: Lead, mentor, and develop a small team of database and platform professionals. Set technical direction and priorities while remaining directly involved in architecture, implementation, and troubleshooting. Serve as the senior escalation point for complex production issues and participate in a shared on-call model. Lead cross-functional initiatives through direct ownership and influence. Contribute to hiring and team development.
Drive Improvement and Modernization: Identify opportunities to improve scalability, efficiency, and cost. Support adoption of Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, and modern data tools. Partner to enable analytics, ML, and AI workloads. Promote automation and standardization.