Senior Engineering Manager, Data Foundations

Onebrief

23h•Remote

About The Position

As Senior Engineering Manager for Data Foundations, you’ll build and lead a new team responsible for establishing the application data architecture that support Onebrief’s next phase of scale. As the platform grows across deployments, customers, and integrations, early-stage data flexibility becomes harder to sustain. You’ll own the evolution to a clear, opinionated, enterprise-grade application data schema, ontology and versioning strategy that all Onebrief product engineering teams build upon. This role is centered on foundational, cross-org problems, not incremental feature delivery. Examples of the challenges this team will own: Iterate and evolve our application data schema, long term data strategy, ontology and ensure our SaaS data architecture is ready for exponential growth Take ownership of our application’s data model and build on its success while evolving its long term architecture to ensure continued growth and resiliency. Establishing a logical data ontology that becomes the baseline for all product data movement Preparing the platform for seamless enterprise integrations, audibility, and data lifecycle governance Ensure our data model is flexible and can operate in cloud and unique air-gapped environments The data foundation you build will directly determine: How quickly our product development teams can ship features safety How fast we are able to scale our 3rd party ecosystem and integrations reliably How well the platform supports new customers, and use cases This role will influence multiple domains at Onebrief including product feature teams, AI, Identity and our back-end services. Getting it right creates leverage for the entire company. You’re a senior engineering leader who has owned foundational systems in enterprise SasS or customer facing data-focus services. You’ve led teams through ambiguous, high-impact architectural change, particularly around data models, schemas, or core platform abstractions. You’re comfortable making trade-off decisions, understanding which ones must be right and which can evolve. You lead with low ego and high trust. You create clarity in complex problem spaces, communicate crisply across functions, and care deeply about building teams and systems that scale beyond you. You won’t be writing production code day to day, but this is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll be making decisions impacting system design, application architecture and technical tradeoffs.

Requirements

10+ years total engineering experience (backend, data, or full-stack)
4+ years directly managing software/data engineering teams
Proven experience designing and scaling data-intensive systems for SaaS or platform products
Experience evolving data models and APIs in production systems with real customers and partners
Demonstrated ability to set and communicate a technical vision for a team or platform area
Strong people leader with experience hiring, mentoring, and growing senior, staff and principle engineers
Track record of navigating complex tradeoffs while maintaining team health and delivery
Comfortable collaborating with senior stakeholders and influencing across organizational boundaries
Deep understanding of data modeling, schema evolution, and event-driven architectures
Experience with distributed systems and data platforms (e.g., PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, NoSQL, graph databases)
Familiarity with API design, contract versioning, and developer-facing data platforms
Cloud-native experience (AWS preferred)
U.S. Citizenship required, with the ability to obtain TS/SCI clearance (not required day 1)

Nice To Haves

Experience with agile product and service development or similar product-led development processes
Familiarity with military, govtech, or other high-trust domains

Responsibilities

Build and lead a focused team designed for high ownership and fast architectural decision-making, with opportunity to expand over time.
Own Onebrief’s data model, schema, and evolution strategy from first principles
Lead large-scale architectural change, setting standards for how data is structured, versioned, and governed
Partner closely with product, platform & infrastructure teams as an application architecture leader.
Drive execution of foundational roadmap initiatives tied to long-term platform success.
Develop Principle, Staff, and Senior engineers, creating clarity and autonomy without becoming a bottleneck

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