Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Senior Manager, Data Engineering

We are seeking a Manager of Data Engineering who is equally comfortable engineering data platforms and developing the engineers who build on them. This is a hybrid technical and people leadership role: the successful candidate will continue to contribute hands-on to data engineering deliverables on Databricks and Azure while also leading, mentoring, and growing a team of 5–8 data engineers and analysts.

Reporting to the Global Head of Data Architecture & Engineering, the Data Engineering Manager will be a member of the Global Data Leadership team and will help shape data engineering strategy, standards, and execution across the organization. The role requires fluency with Databricks and the Azure ecosystem today, and the adaptability to evaluate and adopt additional data technologies as our platform evolves.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technical Leadership
• Platform ownership: Lead the design, build, and continuous improvement of scalable data pipelines, Lakehouse architectures, and data products on Databricks and Azure, ensuring our engineering and architectural standards for performance, reliability, and cost are consistently delivered.
• Hands-on contribution: Remain an active practitioner by contributing to high-impact pipelines, code reviews, architecture reviews, and complex troubleshooting.
• Quality and governance: Champion data quality, observability, security, and governance practices, embedding them into the team's engineering lifecycle and platform standards.
• People Leadership
• Team management: Directly manage a team of 5–8 data engineers, owning hiring, onboarding, performance management, compensation recommendations, and retention.
• Coaching and development: Provide regular coaching, feedback, and career development planning for each team member, with clear growth paths for both individual contributor and leadership tracks.
• Culture and engagement: Foster an inclusive, high-trust team culture grounded in psychological safety, technical curiosity, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Project and Work Orchestration
• Delivery ownership: Plan, prioritize, and orchestrate the team's portfolio of data engineering work, ensuring on-time, on-quality delivery aligned with global data and business priorities.
• Agile execution: Establish and refine agile delivery practices (intake, estimation, sprint planning, retrospectives) that balance discovery work, platform investment, and run-the-business commitments.
• Risk and dependency management: Proactively identify, communicate, and resolve risks, blockers, and cross-team dependencies, escalating clearly and constructively when needed.
• Operational excellence: Own production health for the team's data products, including SLAs, on-call posture, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Stakeholder Management and Cross Team Collaboration
• Business partnership: Build trusted relationships with business and technology stakeholders, translating their objectives into clearly scoped, prioritized data engineering outcomes.
• Global team collaboration: Partner closely with peers across the Global Data Leadership team - architecture, data engineering, AI, governance, and product - to deliver cohesive, end-to-end data solutions.
• Communication and storytelling: Communicate technical concepts, trade-offs, roadmaps, and progress effectively to audiences ranging from engineers to senior executives.

Essential Skills, Knowledge & Experience:

• Significant data engineering experience, including hands-on delivery on Databricks (Spark, Lakeflow, Spark Declarative Pipelines (DLT), Delta Lake, Lakebase/Postgres, Unity Catalog, etc.) and the Azure data ecosystem.
• Demonstratable experience formally managing data engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Track record of delivering production-grade data platforms and pipelines at scale with strong attention to reliability, security, and cost.
• Demonstratable ability to lead complex technical work through influence, not authority.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and prioritization skills in a global, matrixed environment, with a client-service mindset.
• Familiarity with modern data architecture patterns (Lakehouse, Unity Catalog, medallion, data mesh), DataOps practices, and metadata-driven and configuration-driven pipeline frameworks.

Desirable Skills, Knowledge & Experience:

• Experience leading teams through technology transitions and adopting new data tooling beyond an established core stack.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code tooling for data pipelines using Azure DevOps, Databricks Automation Bundles (DABS), GitHub Actions, or equivalent.
• Experience leading cross-team initiatives and working across multiple geographies and time zones as part of a global data organization.

This job description is intended to outline the primary responsibilities and requirements of the role. It is not exhaustive and may be subject to change in line with organizational needs.

Cushman & Wakefield also provides eligible employees with an opportunity to enroll in a variety of benefit programs, generally including health, vision, and dental insurance, flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, retirement savings plans, life, and disability insurance programs, and paid and unpaid time away from work. In addition to a comprehensive benefits package, Cushman and Wakefield provide eligible employees with competitive pay, which may vary depending on eligibility factors such as geographic location, date of hire, total hours worked, job type, business line, and applicability of collective bargaining agreements.

The compensation for the position is: $ 140,250.00 - $165,000.00

Cushman & Wakefield is an Equal Opportunity employer to all protected groups, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities. Discrimination of any type will not be tolerated.

In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA), if you have a disability and would like to request an accommodation in order to apply for a position at Cushman & Wakefield, please call the ADA line at View phone number on click.appcast.io or email View email address on click.appcast.io. Please refer to the job title and job location when you contact us.