Senior Engineering Manager - Data Platform

You will report to the Senior Engineering Manager of the enterprise team that curates, governs, and serves Nike Direct and Marketplace data products to BI experience teams and other GT domains. You will be a senior individual contributor on the squad, working alongside leads and principal engineers to deliver complex backend and data systems. You will mentor SWE I and SWE II engineers, drive technical design within your squad, and influence patterns and standards that cross-squad teams adopt.

Responsibilities:

• As a software engineer III in Marketplace Data Engineering, you will own meaningful slices of our data products, APIs, and pipelines and influence how the broader team builds.
• You will lead the design and delivery of significant backend and data services that serve Marketplace and Nike Direct data to BI experience teams and enterprise consumers.
• You will drive technical design reviews within your squad, choosing patterns, defining contracts, and trading off scope, complexity, and timeline with product partners.
• You will raise the engineering bar through high-leverage code reviews, pairing, and authoring patterns and blueprints that other squads adopt.
• You will own the production reliability and operational quality of the services you build, leading on-call, capacity planning, and post-incident learning.
• You will mentor SWE I and SWE II engineers on the squad and contribute to their growth through career and skills coaching.
• You will partner with the Platform team to adopt recommended toolkits and contribute back improvements when patterns fall short of our needs.
• You will collaborate with globally distributed engineering teams and represent your squad in cross-org technical forums.

Requirements:

• We are looking for senior engineers who own outcomes, engineers who can decompose ambiguous problems, drive high-quality designs, and ship complex systems with minimal oversight.
• A minimum of 5-8 years of backend and/or data engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in at least one of Java, Python, or Scala and confident fluency in SQL and data modelling.
• Proven experience designing and shipping production microservices, RESTful APIs, and event-driven systems.
• Hands-on experience with modern data platforms Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalogue (or equivalent) and orchestration tools such as Airflow.
• Solid cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including IAM, secrets, networking, and cost-aware design.
• Experience leading non-trivial technical designs, writing design documents, and driving them through review with peers.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor junior engineers in code reviews, pairing, and design coaching.
• Experience with distributed messaging (Kafka, SQS), caching (Redis), and search (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch) where relevant.
• Strong test-driven development discipline, including productive use of AI tools like GitHub Copilot.
• Experience with CI/CD, observability (metrics/tracing/alerting), and incident response.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to influence both engineers and senior product/business partners.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, information systems, or a related field or equivalent experience.
• Preferred: experience with data governance, RLS/ABAC, ontology/semantic layers, dbt, agentic/LLM-powered analytics layers, or large-scale BI platforms.

Skills

Data Structures, Java, Node.js, Python, Scala, Spring