Manager, Software Engineering; Data

At Firstup, our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world's workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily.

Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology.

Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent. Our movement has taken root and is evident in our world‑class customer base. Now we need your help.

Ready to make a difference in the world?

Every employee is an owner with responsibility and credit for our progress.

Leadership is in our build and we see change as a catalyst for improvement.

We win as a team, committed to help our coworkers and customers thrive.

We're looking for an experienced Software Engineering Manager (Data) to join our team! You will have opportunities to work with customers to solve technology challenges. We are quickly growing and you will deliver new solutions and services while always improving our approach to architecture, scale, availability and fault‑tolerance. Engineering is a craft, and at Firstup we believe the internals of our technology are as elegant as user experience.

If there is a specific challenge you are looking for, we most likely have it for you.

Teams are empowered and supported to make an impact every day. We work in autonomous product teams, and you'll work with Product Managers, Designers, QA, and other engineers on a daily basis. You will partner with others across the company in shared codebases, and contribute directly to other services when needed. We iterate quickly to see what works and what doesn't and follow the data to bring our strategy.

We encourage you to take chances and fail because that is how we grow. We are a distributed team and have been since day 1. We build solutions for distributed work forces so we model our workforce the same way. In this role you really can work where you want within the United States.

• Drive the strategy, design, and delivery of scalable data platforms powering business intelligence, predictive analytics, and LLM capabilities across enterprise customers, built on modern microservices architecture.
• Drive the successful completion of complex projects that span multiple domain teams as data is core to our platform.
• Provide senior technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, and code reviews, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of Generative AI tools and coding agents to increase developer productivity, improve code quality, and accelerate innovation.
• Partner closely with Product Management and Design to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Manage, mentor, and grow a distributed team of software and quality engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Own production health for your teams’ services, including on‑call rotations, incident response, and post‑incident reviews in a “you build it, you run it” environment.
• Lead operational excellence initiatives to improve observability, resiliency, automation, and alignment with defined SLOs and enterprise SLAs.

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field of study; or commensurate professional experience required.
• 10+ years of professional software experience, including 3+ years managing teams of engineers developing data pipelines and analytics applications.
• Proven experience delivering customer‑facing Enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Strong hands‑on or architectural experience with modern data platform tooling, including but not limited to Apache Airflow, dbt, Kafka, AWS Glue, AWS Redshift, AWS Sage Maker, AWS Dynamo, AWS Quick Sight.
• Success leading a data…