Software Engineering Manager

About Us 

dbt Labs is the pioneer of analytics engineering, helping data teams transform raw data into reliable, actionable insights. Since 2016, we’ve grown from an open source project into the leading analytics engineering platform, now used by over 50,000 teams every week. 

As of February 2025, we’ve surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and serve more than 5,400 dbt Cloud customers, including JetBlue, HubSpot, Vodafone New Zealand, and Dunelm. We’re backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter. At our core, we believe in empowering data practitioners:

• Code-based data transformations unlock transparency, flexibility, and collaboration
• Analysts should adopt software engineering best practices to build trusted data products
• Core analytics infrastructure should be open source and user-controlled
• Analytic code—not just tools—should be shared and community-driven

dbt is now synonymous with analytics engineering, defining the modern data stack and serving as the data control plane for enterprise teams around the world. And we’re just getting started. We’re growing fast and building a team of passionate, curious people across the globe. Learn more about what makes us special by checking out our values.  

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Engineering Manager to lead a team focused on the company’s exciting new Fusion & Compute initiatives. This role requires a unique balance of technical expertise and people leadership. You’ll guide a team of talented engineers working on foundational systems and services that power our company’s most critical products.

As an Engineering Manager, you will set the technical vision, drive execution on high-impact initiatives, and ensure strong collaboration across teams. You’ll be expected to stay close to the codebase—contributing to architecture decisions, performing code reviews, and occasionally coding alongside your team—while also providing the guidance, mentorship, and structure that enable engineers to thrive.

This role is for you if you have a passion for database internals, drivers, the nuances of data types, and maybe even compiler design.

This is an opportunity for someone who is excited to solve complex engineering challenges, foster a culture of excellence, and build the systems that are core to our long-term success. 🚀

In this role, you can expect to:

• Build, lead, and coach a team of engineers to deliver delightful developer experiences
• Empower your team with business context. Support their ownership of the team roadmap, product development lifecycle, and technical excellence
• Partner with Product and Design to create a long-term vision for data practitioner workflows
• Coach engineers in product thinking, quality, and system design. Build individualized growth plans and match interests and capabilities to available work.
• Work with peer managers to evolve organizational processes like hiring, onboarding, and project execution.
• Address customer needs and concerns in partnership with our Customer Support team.

Qualifications:

• 2+ years in people management with a product engineering team
• Experience leading teams through all parts of the product development lifecycle. You’ve lived design, implementation, end-to-end testing, observability, release strategies, and incident management.
• Experience at the systems engineering level of database architecture, compute engines, or compilers.
• Success partnering with in-house recruiting to hire and retain senior engineering talent
• Degree in Computer Science or similar, and proven expertise with C, C++, Rust, or Java.

You are a good fit if you have:

• Worked asynchronously as part of a fully-remote, distributed team
• You have strong communication skills. You can communicate complex engineering tradeoffs to stakeholders with differing levels of technical fluency.
• You have startup or scale-up experience. You may be asked to wear many hats, and agility in shifting roles and scopes will contribute to your success.
• You’re pragmatic & toolchain agnostic. You’ve seen a variety of languages and technologies and choose the stack that best fits the esign criteria.
• You have an opinion on what constitutes high-performing and clear direction on arriving there with your team.

You'll have an edge if you have:

• Worked on analytical database tooling, SQL, or query optimizers.

 

Compensation & Benefits

• Annual