Tech Lead Manager - Data

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

Saildrone builds autonomous systems that dominate the world’s oceans

With more than 2 million nautical miles sailed and 50,000 days at sea, Saildrone has earned the trust of governments worldwide. Our unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) deliver continuous, real-time intelligence in the toughest oceans on Earth—giving our partners faster awareness, stronger security, and a decisive edge at sea.

Our USVs are long-range, extreme-endurance platforms powered by advanced sensors and proprietary AI - they have been designed to operate where no crewed vessel can. They collect critical insights above and below the surface to support border security, law enforcement, naval operations, and undersea infrastructure protection.

Headquartered in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington, DC, and global deployment hubs, Saildrone operates missions worldwide. Join a fast-moving, mission-driven team at the intersection of AI, autonomy, and defense technology—where data turns into intelligence, and intelligence drives action.

We are seeking a data engineering technical leader to guide our data engineering team through execution of projects, which include building datasets of vessels at sea to catch drug smuggling, ocean floor data to map previously undiscovered underwater features, and 20

Hz wind data from the middle of a hurricane. This data is transmitted over satellite in real-time, ingested into services and data stores that this team maintains, and served up to external customers, as well as our internal mission control team of maritime experts. Additionally, there is cross-functional collaboration with our machine learning team to train ML models and derive key insights from our giant dataset.

This role requires hands-on design & development, staying close to the codebase, and leading cross-functional projects. Additionally, you will provide people leadership over a team of 4 ICs to help the team grow and thrive in their careers.

This role is required to be onsite in Alameda, CA in the Bay Area 3 days per week - this is our hybrid model. This is not a remote position.

Work with your team, engineering leaders, and other technical / non-technical stakeholders to develop a highly reliable, low latency data pipeline, while ensuring dataset quality.

Utilize your engineering management skills to execute along a roadmap defined by business objectives, clarifying requirements, and informed by rigorous engineering design.

Work with our technical program management team to align work to schedules and ensure delivery.

Communicate in a friendly, supportive manner with engineers or other stakeholders, ensuring alignment and advocating for effective solutions.

Engage with cross-functional teams of product managers, technical program managers, technical leads, software engineers and infrastructure engineers.

Mentor and facilitate career development for individual contributors.

Drive and support a culture of rigorous design and test around software features.

8+ years of relevant data engineering software development

1+ years people management experience, including technical team leadership, scheduling, and resource planning

Expertise in relational databases (Postgres, AWS Aurora, PostGIS)

Working knowledge of data warehousing solutions (Athena / Presto, Big Query, Redshift, Snowflake, or Vertica)

Familiar with Argo, Dagster, Airflow, or Luigi workflow orchestration engines

Able to provide clear priorities, and be hands on as needed to ensure successful delivery

Knowledge of software processes to produce sustainable and maintainable code

Good verbal and written communication skills

Experience working with time series, geospatial, geo-temporal, or map-tile data would be a huge bonus

Experience with data from drones or robots, such as those from ROS-based systems, would also be very helpful

Expertise in Python or NodeJS programming languages

Familiar with Parquet or Protobuf data file formats

Experience with streaming technologies such Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Flink

Experience with serverless functions, such as AWS Lambda

No

SQL experience…