Senior Manager Data Engineering

Overview

Acuity Inc. (NYSE: AYI) is a market-leading industrial technology company. We design, manufacture, and bring to market products and services that solve problems in spaces, light and more to come, across two business segments:
Acuity Brands Lighting (ABL) and Acuity Intelligent Spaces (AIS). We focus on customer outcomes and drive growth and productivity to increase market share and deliver superior returns. Acuity Inc. is based in Atlanta, Georgia, with operations across North America, Europe and Asia. The company is powered by approximately 13,000 associates. Visit us at

We are seeking a Senior Manager Data Engineering to lead our data engineering team and build a modern, AI-ready data ecosystem on the Azure Data Platform. This role will ensure that our enterprise data is integrated, enriched, compliant, and readily consumable for analytics, BI, and ML/AI use cases. The ideal candidate is a hands-on leader who can bridge engineering excellence with business needs, while enabling scalable AI-driven innovation.

This role is open across the United States; however, candidates located in the Eastern or Central Time Zones are strongly preferred to optimize collaboration with cross-functional teams.

• Team Leadership & Strategy
  • Lead, mentor, and grow data engineers and BI engineers, fostering a high-performance, collaborative culture.
  • Define and execute the data engineering roadmap aligned with enterprise AI and analytics strategies.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, finance, IT security, operations) to ensure data priorities support business outcomes.
• Data Platform & AI/ML Readiness
  • Architect and oversee ingestion, transformation, and integration of diverse data sources (structured/unstructured, batch/streaming).
  • Partner closely with ML/AI teams to understand data requirements, design AI-ready datasets, and ensure data pipelines support model training and inference.
  • Enable CI/CD integration of ML models into production data pipelines and APIs.
  • Build domain-oriented, enriched datasets that power analytics, operational insights, and advanced AI/ML use cases.
• Data Governance & Compliance
  • Oversee the data marketplace / catalog to ensure discoverability, secure access, and auditability.
  • Implement access controls, encryption, and audit trails for PII/SPII and regulated data.
  • Ensure adherence to SOX, GDPR, CCPA and internal compliance standards.
  • Drive data quality, lineage, and governance initiatives using enterprise data marketplace tool.
• Data Democratization, Consumption & Literacy
  • Drive data democratization by making curated, governed data easily accessible to business users and power users.
  • Partner with BI and analytics teams to build semantic layers and data models that accelerate consumption in Power BI and other tools.
  • Lead data literacy programs to ensure stakeholders “speak data” and use a consistent, trusted source of truth across the organization.
  • Evangelize data sharing internally and externally, making it seamless for partners, vendors, and agencies while ensuring compliance and governance.
  • Champion the use of data to enable timely, actionable insights that directly impact decision-making and business outcomes.
• Operational Excellence & Data Ops
  • Monitor performance, optimize cost, and drive reliability across pipelines, lakehouse, and warehouse environments.
  • Champion Data Ops practices including automation, CI/CD pipelines, testing, and monitoring.
  • Collaborate with Enterprise Architects to align with enterprise-wide standards and future-state data architecture.
  • Partner with Finance to implement Fin Ops practices that balance scalability with cost efficiency.
• Innovation & Vendor Management
  • Stay ahead of emerging trends (GenAI, data mesh, real-time APIs, external data monetization) and recommend adoption where relevant.
  • Evaluate, select, and manage external vendors, tools, and technologies to strengthen the data ecosystem.
  • Drive innovation and experimentation while ensuring long-term platform stability and governance.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
• 10+…