Engineering Manager, Data Platform

Grammarly is excited to offer a remote-first hybrid working model. Grammarly team members in this role must be based in San Francisco. They must meet in person for collaboration weeks, traveling if necessary to the hub(s) where their team is based.

This flexible approach gives team members the best of both worlds: plenty of focus time along with in-person collaboration that fosters trust and unlocks creativity.

About Grammarly

Grammarly is the world’s leading AI writing assistance company trusted by over 30 million people and 70,000 teams. From instantly creating a first draft to perfecting every message, Grammarly helps people at 96% of the Fortune 500 and teams at companies like Atlassian, Databricks, and Zoom get their point across—and get results—with best-in-class security practices that keep data private and protected. Founded in 2009, Grammarly is No. 14 on the Forbes Cloud 100, one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies, one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in AI, and one of Inc.’s Best Workplaces.

The Opportunity

To achieve our ambitious goals, we’re looking for a Software Engineer to join our Data Platform team and help us build a world-class data platform. Grammarly’s success depends on its ability to efficiently ingest over 60 billion daily events while using our systems to improve our product. This role is a unique opportunity to experience all aspects of building complex software systems: contributing to the strategy, defining the architecture, and building and shipping to production.

Grammarly’s engineers and researchers have the freedom to innovate and uncover breakthroughs—and, in turn, influence our product roadmap. The complexity of our technical challenges is growing rapidly as we scale our interfaces, algorithms, and infrastructure. You can hear more from our team on our technical blog.

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Manager for our Data Platform team to achieve our ambitious objectives. This role is crucial in managing and evolving our data infrastructure, engineering, and governance processes to support modern machine learning (ML) use cases, self-serve analytics, and data policy management across the organization. The ideal candidate will possess strong technical expertise, exceptional leadership abilities, and the capability to mentor and develop a high-performing team that operates across data infrastructure, engineering, and governance.

This person will be integral to the larger data organization, reporting directly to the Director of Data Platform. They will have the opportunity to influence decisions and the direction of our overall data platform, including data processing, infrastructure, data governance, and analytics engineering. Grammarly’s engineers and researchers have the freedom to innovate and uncover breakthroughs—and, in turn, influence our product roadmap. The complexity of our technical challenges is growing rapidly as we scale our interfaces, algorithms, and infrastructure.

As the Data Platform team manager, you will lead and mentor a team of data engineers, infrastructure engineers, and data governance specialists, fostering a collaborative and innovative environment focused on professional growth. You will oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of secure, scalable, and optimized data platforms, ensuring high performance and reliability. Your role includes developing and executing strategic roadmaps aligned with business objectives and collaborating closely with cross-functional teams and the larger data organization to ensure seamless data integration, governance, and access. Additionally, you will provide technical leadership and play a pivotal role in resource management and recruiting efforts, driving the team’s success and aligning with the organization’s long-term data strategy.

In this role, you will:

• Build a highly specialized data platform team to support the growing needs and complexity of our product, business, and ML organizations.
• Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of a robust data infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability across ingestion, processing, and storage layers.
• Lead the development of frameworks and tooling that enable self-serve analytics, policy management, and seamless data governance across the organization.
• Ensure data is collected, transformed, and stored efficiently to support real-time, batch processing, and machine learning needs.
• Act as a liaison between the Data Platform team and the broader organization, ensuring seamless communication, collaboration, and alignment with global data strategies.
• Drive cross-functional meetings and initiatives to represent the Data Platform team’s interests and contribute to the organization’s overall data strategy, ensuring ML and analytics use cases are adequately supported.
• Drive the evaluation, selection, and implementation of new technologies and tools that enhance the team’s capabilities and improve the organization’s overall data infrastructure and governance processes.
• Implement and enforce data governance policies and practices to ensure data quality, privacy, security, and compliance with organizational standards.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define and refine data governance policies that align with business objectives and facilitate discoverability and accessibility of high-quality data.
• Monitor and assess the data platform's performance to identify areas for optimization, cost management, and continuous improvement.
• Foster a collaborative and high-performance culture within the team, emphasizing ownership and innovation.
• Cultivate an ownership mindset and culture across product and platform teams by providing necessary metrics to drive informed decisions and continuous improvement.
• Set high performance and quality standards, coaching team members to meet them, and mentoring and growing junior and senior IC talent.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, infrastructure & governance, with at least 2-3 years in a leadership or management role.
• Proven experience in building and managing large-scale data platforms, including data ingestion pipelines and infrastructure.
• Experience with cloud platforms and data ecosystems such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and Databricks.
• Familiarity with modern data engineering and orchestration tools and frameworks (e.g., Apache Kafka, Airflow, DBT, Spark).
• Strong understanding of data governance frameworks, policy management, and self-serve analytics platforms.
• Excellent leadership and people management skills, with a track record of mentoring and developing high-performing teams.
• Experience working with geographically distributed teams and aligning with global data and governance strategies.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate and resolve complex technical challenges.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with stakeholders across different locations and time zones.
• Proven ability to operate in a fast-paced, dynamic environment where things change quickly.
• Leads by setting well-understood goals and sharing the appropriate level of context for maximum autonomy, but is also profoundly technical and can dive in to help when necessary.
• Embodies our EAGER values—ethical, adaptable, gritty, empathetic, and remarkable.
• Is inspired by our MOVE principles: move fast and learn faster; obsess about creating customer value; value impact over activity; and embrace healthy disagreement rooted in trust.
• Willingness to meet in person for scheduled team collaboration weeks and travel, if necessary, to the hub where the team is based.

Compensation and Benefits

Grammarly offers all team members competitive pay along with a benefits package encompassing the following and more: 

• Excellent health care (including a wide range of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and fertility benefits)
• Disability and life insurance options
• 401(k) and RRSP matching 
• Paid parental leave
• 20 days of paid time off per year, 12 days of paid holidays per year, two floating holidays per year, and flexible sick time
• Generous stipends (including those for caregiving, pet care, wellness, your home office, and more)
• Annual professional development budget and opportunities

Grammarly takes a market-based approach to compensation, which means base pay may vary depending on your location. Our US locations are categorized into two compensation zones based on proximity to our hub locations.

Base pay may vary considerably depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The expected salary ranges for this position are outlined below by compensation zone and may be modified in the future. 

For more information about our compensation zones and locations where we currently support employment, please refer to this page. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information. 

We encourage you to apply

At Grammarly, we value our differences, and we encourage all to apply. Grammarly is an equal opportunity company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnic origin, religion or belief, gender, disability, sexual identity, or age.

For more details about the personal data Grammarly collects during the recruitment process, for what purposes, and how you can address your rights, please see the Grammarly Data Privacy Notice for Candidates here. 

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