Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering

SolarWinds • Austin, TX

19h

About The Position

SolarWinds is hiring a Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering to build and lead the team responsible for administering and configuring the Enterprise Data tech stack — Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau. This person will set technical direction and architecture standards across the platform, and build, coach, and grow the team that executes day to day. This is a working-manager (player-coach) role, not a pure people-management position: the team is small today, and this person is expected to stay technically close to the platform — setting patterns and making architecture calls, and personally covering tech-stack administration the team hasn't yet grown to cover — while delegating hands-on execution to their report(s) where it exists. You'll balance hands-on technical leadership with people management — coaching your team, setting goals, and representing the platform in cross-functional planning with adjacent teams.

Requirements

• Deep, hands-on background in Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, and Dataplex — enough to retain technical credibility and keep setting standards for the team.
• Hands-on experience administering and configuring dbt (or a comparable transformation platform) and Fivetran (or a comparable ELT tool).
• Experience administering Tableau or a comparable BI platform — permissions, licensing, and platform configuration.
• Track record of technical leadership — driving standards, mentoring engineers, or leading initiatives — even without formal management experience.
• Experience or demonstrated readiness to lead a technical team — formal people-management experience is helpful but not required.
• Demonstrated ability to balance architecture/strategic work with hands-on operational realities.
• Strong communication skills — able to represent the team's priorities and trade-offs to peers and senior leadership.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience leading or mentoring a technical team, even informally (tech lead, staff-level mentorship, project leadership).
• Experience scaling a team from one or two people to a larger group.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow the Data Platform Engineering team — starting with one direct report, with a plan to scale as workload and budget allow.
• Run regular 1:1s, set clear goals, and manage performance and career development for direct report(s).
• Own hiring for the team as it grows, partnering with People and the hiring committee on leveling and comp.
• Own architecture standards and technical roadmap across the Enterprise Data tech stack — Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau.
• Make build-vs-buy and platform-pattern decisions that shape how the team executes day to day.
• Stay hands-on enough to unblock the team on hard technical problems, without personally owning routine operational work.
• Ensure Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau are properly administered and configured — access, environments, and platform settings across the stack.
• Own dbt Cloud platform administration (environments, scheduling, CI/CD, access); model development and transformation logic remain with Data Engineering.
• Own Tableau platform administration (user access, groups, permissions, licensing), scaling this to a dedicated hire as the team grows.
• Set and maintain configuration standards so the stack stays consistent, secure, and auditable as the team scales.
• Ensure the team's reliability, cost, and governance commitments — across ingestion, BigQuery, Dataplex/PII access, dbt, and Tableau — are being met.
• Review and prioritise the team's operational backlog against the platform roadmap.
• Represent the Data Platform Engineering pillar in planning with Data Engineering, Data Governance, Cloud Security, and Business Intelligence.
• Negotiate priorities and dependencies with adjacent teams on the team's behalf, rather than leaving individual engineers to manage those relationships alone.

Benefits

• SolarWinds is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. SolarWinds will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.
• All applications are treated in accordance with the SolarWinds Privacy Notice: https://www.solarwinds.com/applicant-privacy-notice

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed