Engineering Manager - Data Platform

Engineering Manager – Data Platform

Who We Are

We are Two Circles. We are a Sports & Entertainment Marketing business. We grow audiences and revenues. We do that by knowing fans best. We work with clients to help them understand and influence what their fans are doing – the way fans spend their money, the events that fans attend, the channels fans respond to, the content fans watch, and more.

We use the understanding this gives us to help our clients grow. Grow their audiences and grow their revenues – both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business revenues. Our platforms and services are trusted by over 900 clients globally, including the English Premier League, Red Bull, UEFA, VISA, the NFL, Nike, and Amazon.

We are almost 1,000 people, based across 14 offices worldwide, delivering work for sports and entertainment businesses of all shapes and sizes across the globe.

What You Will Do

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team within our Data Platform organization, which comprises more than 100 Data & BI Engineers building the industry's leading Audience Intelligence Platform.

You will lead a team of Data Engineers responsible for building and operating data products, pipelines, and platform capabilities that power data-driven decision-making across the global sports industry. Working closely with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, Lead Engineers, and Engineering Leadership, you will help ensure the team delivers high-quality solutions while continuously improving engineering practices, developer experience, and team effectiveness.

This is a highly technical player-coach role. Approximately 60% of your time will be focused on people leadership, delivery, stakeholder management, and team development, while 40% will be spent driving technical initiatives, architecture, engineering standards, AI adoption, and developer productivity.

We are looking for someone who has established themselves as a strong individual contributor before moving into leadership and who remains passionate about technology. You should be comfortable contributing hands-on when appropriate, leading technical discussions, partnering with Lead Engineers on architecture and design decisions, and helping shape the future direction of our data platform.

Success in this role is measured through the growth and performance of your team, the quality and predictability of delivery, and your ability to elevate engineering capability, developer experience, and technical innovation across the organization.

The team consists primarily of experienced Data Engineers located across Vancouver and Hyderabad, requiring strong collaboration, communication, and leadership across regions

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

Build & Lead Engineering Teams

• Lead, coach, and develop Data Engineers through regular feedback, mentoring, and career development planning.
• Build a high-performing engineering culture focused on accountability, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Create clarity around expectations, goals, and team priorities.
• Support hiring, onboarding, and development of engineering talent across regions.
• Champion developer experience by improving tooling, workflows, documentation, and engineering productivity.

Drive Delivery & Engineering Excellence

• Partner with Product Managers, Delivery Managers, QA, and Engineering Leadership to align priorities and ensure predictable delivery.
• Work closely with Lead Engineers to define technical scope, manage risks, remove blockers, and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Ensure consistent adoption of SDLC practices, including code reviews, testing, CI/CD, release management, monitoring, and operational ownership.
• Advocate engineering best practices across architecture, quality, security, automation, observability, and reliability.
• Support engineers in making sound technical decisions and navigating trade-offs.
• Ensure stakeholders have clear visibility into progress, risks, and delivery outcomes.

Drive Technical Strategy & Engineering Productivity

• Partner with Lead Engineers to shape technical direction, architecture decisions, and engineering standards across the platform.
• Lead initiatives that improve developer experience, engineering productivity, platform reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI and emerging technologies to improve engineering workflows, platform capabilities, and business outcomes.
• Contribute hands-on to technical initiatives, proofs of concept, architecture spikes, and strategic engineering projects where appropriate.
• Foster a culture of technical curiosity, experimentation, and continuous learning.

Enable Innovation & Platform Growth

• Support the evolution of the Data Platform through modern engineering practices, cloud-native technologies, and scalable architecture patterns.
• Champion experimentation and learning around emerging technologies as we aim towards becoming an AI-native organization.
• Drive improvements in onboarding, operational excellence, engineering consistency, and developer productivity across global teams.
• Partner with Support and Client Enablement teams to improve operational responsiveness and customer outcomes.
• Promote knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams, disciplines, and regions.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering
• 3+ years of experience leading, managing, or mentoring engineers in a product-focused environment.
• Strong track record as a hands-on data engineer before moving into leadership.
• Experience designing, building, and operating modern cloud-native data platforms, preferably in Azure.
• Strong understanding of modern software development practices, SDLC processes, and scalable platform architecture.
• Strong understanding of data engineering concepts, including data pipelines, orchestration, data quality, analytics platforms, and operational support.
• Experience with technologies such as Python, Databricks, Spark, Azure Data Factory, SQL, and CI/CD tooling.
• Ability to contribute technically through architecture reviews, technical design, code reviews, and hands-on development.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to bridge technical and non-technical conversations.
• Passion for fostering innovation, improving developer experience, and enabling teams to deliver effectively at scale.
• Experience with DevOps practices, Infrastructure-as-Code, automated testing, and platform engineering concepts.
• Experience driving engineering productivity, developer experience, or platform modernization initiatives.
• Experience working in a fast-paced product or SaaS environment.