Senior Manager, Data Engineering

Who We Are

At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset – our people. We help businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues, are data‑driven and never stop iterating.

If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment and build something meaningful while having fun, we’d love to hear from you. We’re united by shared goals and motivations. Our values are reflected in our product and our team.

Technology, Data & AI

The Data & Analytics team is Justworks' data and AI center of excellence – a connected set of functions spanning business intelligence, data science, analytics engineering, platform data/ML engineering and AI builders. We’ve grown significantly over the last several years and continue to build momentum across the business, leveling up maturity in how we deliver insights, govern data, and enable the company to make better decisions.

You'll find a highly collaborative & diverse group motivated by craft, shared learning, and a genuine commitment to growing our impact for customers while evolving how we work together for our people. Come build with us! The Data Platform Engineering team sits at the core of this foundation, owning the pipelines, platform infrastructure, and reliability that every other DNA function depends on.

You're a hands‑on engineering leader with deep experience building and operating modern data platforms. You’ve led teams through scale – evolving architecture, improving reliability, and making hard trade‑offs between speed, cost, and quality. You’re as comfortable reviewing a PR or debugging a pipeline failure as you are setting quarterly roadmap priorities or presenting a platform strategy to senior leadership. You think in systems – how pipelines, orchestration, governance, and observability connect to produce a trustworthy platform – and you know how to build a team that operates with both craft and urgency.

You develop engineers, set a high technical bar, and create an environment where people grow. You bring strong opinions grounded in experience with modern PaaS data stack technologies – Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, dbt, Estuary – and you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t wflake is core to how we operate and you should have depth there. Reporting to the VP of Data & Analytics, you’ll lead the data platform organization, setting technical direction, driving operational excellence, and ensuring the platform is reliable, scalable, and built to support the company’s growth.

• Own the technical direction of Justworks' core data platform – pipelines, infrastructure, orchestration, and standards that keep it trustworthy
• Lead architectural decisions on cloud data infrastructure, balancing scalability, cost, reliability, and security
• Drive operational excellence across the platform – observability, data quality, cost optimization, incident management, and SLAs
• Set and enforce engineering standards – testing, documentation, CI/CD, and code review best practices
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure as code, ensuring the platform is auditable, repeatable, and resilient

• Lead and develop a team of data engineers, including direct line managers and individual contributors at various levels
• Set a high bar for engineering craft – mentor engineers, conduct architecture reviews, and foster a culture of continuous improvement
• Recruit and hire high‑caliber data engineers as the platform team grows
• Create an environment where engineers develop their skills, take ownership, and do the best work of their careers

• Partner with DNA functional teams (e.g., Analytics Engineering, BI, Data Science) and distributed Data Engineering teams to ensure the platform serves the full breadth of organizational needs
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to align on data contracts,…