Senior Manager, Scientific Data Engineering

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Scientific Data Engineers (SDE) spread across multiple forward deployed engineering squads and drive both technical and organizational excellence. This role is ideal for a leader who can zoom out to see systemic inefficiencies across teams and processes, then roll up their sleeves to fix them — while also building a culture where engineers do their best work.

What You'll Do

• Team & People Leadership
• Supervise and guide SDEs in each squad in planning, implementation, testing, and documentation. Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement across teams.
• Lead by example - comfortable with diving deeper into organizational and technical challenges and help the team navigate ambiguity and vagueness.
• Manage performance, career development, and org design as teams scale
• Hire, mentor, and retain strong engineering talent; build a pipeline of future technical leaders
• Operational Excellence
• Proactively identify inefficiencies in engineering workflows, processes, and cross-team handoffs — don't wait to be told something is broken
• Design and implement systems (planning cadences, metrics, tooling) that increase velocity and reduce friction across teams
• Establish and track meaningful engineering metrics (cycle time, deployment frequency, incident rates, etc.) to guide decisions
• Drive continuous process improvement, balancing speed with sustainability
• Technical & Engineering Excellence
• Set and uphold engineering standards for code quality, architecture, testing, and operational reliability across teams
• Partner with tech leads and architects on key technical decisions and trade-offs
• Champion best practices in system design, scalability, and maintainability
• Stay close enough to the technical details to ask sharp questions and unblock teams when needed
• Strategy & Cross-Functional Partnership
• Translate company and product strategy into actionable engineering roadmaps across multiple teams
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and other stakeholders to align priorities and timelines
• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executive leadership
• Own budget, headcount planning, and resource allocation for your organization

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• Required
• Overall 10+ years of work experience, including at least 5 years being a manager or leading through other managers
• Proven track record of identifying and resolving operational inefficiencies at scale (process, tooling, or organizational)
• Demonstrated commitment to engineering excellence — quality, reliability, and maintainable systems, not just shipping speed
• Experience managing managers and building organizational structure as teams grow
• Strong technical background with the credibility to engage deeply on architecture and design decisions
• Excellent communication skills, with experience presenting to executive stakeholders
• Experience setting and using engineering metrics to drive decisions and improvements
• Comfortable working in a changing environment and navigating through unclear requirements
• Nice to Have
• Experience scaling an engineering org through significant growth (e.g., 2x–5x headcount)
• Experience working in startups
• Experience in working with life science data
• Experience with distributed/remote engineering teams
• History of building or maturing engineering processes from scratch (SDLC, release management, incident response)

What Success Looks Like in the First Year

• Identify key engineering operational bottlenecks and inefficiencies
• Engineering teams operate with clear, well-understood processes and reduced cross-team friction
• Engineering teams able to accurately predict engineering effort and deliver high-quality products on time
• Measurable improvement in key engineering metrics (velocity, quality, reliability)
• Engineering is seen as a trusted, proactive partner by Product and executive leadership