Senior Manager (dbt Fusion)

Join our team as a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Core team behind dbt V2, our next-generation engine. In this hands-on role, you will be responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving the Rust-based engine that powers dbt Fusion. You will work closely with Product and other engineering teams to establish a clear roadmap, balance new feature development with engine maintenance, and guide end-to-end technical design. You will also actively contribute to technical design and implementation alongside the team.

Lead and manage a team of engineers responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving the Rust-based engine that powers dbt Fusion.

Responsibilities

• Establish clarity across a technically demanding roadmap with multiple product and engineering stakeholders, and partner closely with Product to translate ambiguous requirements into realistic engineering scope.
• Actively contribute to technical design and implementation alongside the team, and support engineers in making sound tradeoffs across product value, technical quality, performance, compatibility, and delivery risk.
• Demonstrated judgment in balancing roadmap delivery with reliability, maintainability, technical debt, and product quality
• Successfully partnered with Product and other engineering teams to create a stable roadmap and make difficult prioritization decisions

Requirements

• Experience leading teams through multiple concurrent priorities and diverse integration points
• Ability to lead or facilitate system design from problem definition through implementation and delivery
• Comfort operating in a fluid environment where team boundaries, priorities, and scope may evolve
• Worked on products with substantial technical complexity, integration surfaces, or platform dependencies
• Strong software-engineering fundamentals and prior experience as a senior/staff engineer, technical lead, or equivalent hands-on technical leader
• A track record of developing strong engineers while maintaining a high technical bar

You are a good fit if you have

• The ability to explain complex technical systems clearly to engineers, product partners, and candidates with different levels of technical depth
• A hands-on technical orientation, including a willingness and ability to stay close to code and engineering details
• Led a software team through the full development lifecycle: discovery, design, implementation, testing, release, operation, and iteration
• Ability to translate complex or ambiguous product requirements into credible engineering estimates, milestones, and tradeoffs
• Startup or scale-up experience and comfort wearing multiple hats while the organization evolves
• Contributions to open-source projects or experience working with open standards and open technical communities
• Experience working in a remote-first or distributed organization with strong written communication practices

Preferred

• Experience in data transformation, orchestration, query engines, databases, developer tools, compilers, language tooling, or a closely related area. Direct dbt experience is helpful but not required
• Familiarity with ecosystems such as Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, DuckDB, ADBC, or related data and execution technologies
• Experience with SQL semantics, query optimization, transpilation across dialects, data lineage, governance, or developer-facing language features
• Experience with Rust or another systems programming language, compilers, query planning, language servers, IDE tooling, or developer platforms
• Experience building or operating data transformation, orchestration, warehouse, or execution systems

Pay

USD 240,901 - 301,126