Senior Engineering Manager, Data Foundations
About Onebrief
Onebrief is collaboration and AI-powered workflow software designed specifically for military staffs. By transforming this work, Onebrief makes the staff as a whole superhuman - meaning faster, smarter, and more efficient.
We take ownership, seek excellence, and play to win with the seriousness and camaraderie of an Olympic team. Onebrief operates as an all-remote company, though many of our employees work alongside our customers at military commands around the world.
Founded in 2019 by a group of experienced planners, today, Onebrief’s team spans veterans from all forces and global organizations, and technologists from leading-edge software companies. We’ve raised $320m+ from top-tier investors, including Battery Ventures, General Catalyst, Sapphire Ventures, Insight Partners, and Human Capital, and today, Onebrief is valued at $2.15B. With this continued growth, Onebrief is able to make an impact where it matters most.
About the Role:
As Senior Engineering Manager for Data Foundations, you’ll build and lead a new team responsible for establishing the application data architecture that support Onebrief’s next phase of scale.
As the platform grows across deployments, customers, and integrations, early-stage data flexibility becomes harder to sustain. You’ll own the evolution to a clear, opinionated, enterprise-grade application data schema, ontology and versioning strategy that all Onebrief product engineering teams build upon.
The Kinds of Problems You’ll Tackle:
This role is centered on foundational, cross-org problems, not incremental feature delivery.
Examples of the challenges this team will own:
Iterate and evolve our application data schema, long term data strategy, ontology and ensure our SaaS data architecture is ready for exponential growth
Take ownership of our application’s data model and build on its success while evolving its long term architecture to ensure continued growth and resiliency.
Establishing a logical data ontology that becomes the baseline for all product data movement
Preparing the platform for seamless enterprise integrations, audibility, and data lifecycle governance
Ensure our data model is flexible and can operate in cloud and unique air-gapped environments
Why This Role Matters:
The data foundation you build will directly determine:
How quickly our product development teams can ship features safety
How fast we are able to scale our 3rd party ecosystem and integrations reliably
How well the platform supports new customers, and use cases
This role will influence multiple domains at Onebrief including product feature teams, AI, Identity and our back-end services. Getting it right creates leverage for the entire company.
About You:
You’re a senior engineering leader who has owned foundational systems in enterprise SasS or customer facing data-focus services.
You’ve led teams through ambiguous, high-impact architectural change, particularly around data models, schemas, or core platform abstractions. You’re comfortable making trade-off decisions, understanding which ones must be right and which can evolve.
You lead with low ego and high trust. You create clarity in complex problem spaces, communicate crisply across functions, and care deeply about building teams and systems that scale beyond you.
What You’ll Do:
Build and lead a focused team designed for high ownership and fast architectural decision-making, with opportunity to expand over time.
Own Onebrief’s data model, schema, and evolution strategy from first principles
Lead large-scale architectural change, setting standards for how data is structured, versioned, and governed
Partner closely with product, platform & infrastructure teams as an application architecture leader.
Drive execution of foundational roadmap initiatives tied to long-term platform success.
Develop Principle, Staff, and Senior engineers, creating clarity and autonomy without becoming a bottleneck
You won’t be writing production code day to day, but this is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll be making decisions impacting system design, application architecture and technical tradeoffs.
What We Look For:
10+ years total engineering experience (backend, data, or full-stack)
4+ years directly managing software/data engineering teams
Proven experience designing and scaling data-intensive systems for SaaS or platform products
Experience evolving data models and APIs in production systems with real customers and partners
Demonstrated ability to set and communicate a technical vision for a team or platform area
Strong people leader with experience hiring, mentoring, and growing senior, staff and principle engineers
Track record of navigating complex tradeoffs while maintaining team health and delivery
Comfortable collaborating with senior stakeholders and influencing across organizational boundaries
Deep understanding of data modeling, schema evolution, and event-driven architectures
Experience with distributed systems and data platforms (e.g., PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, NoSQL, graph databases)
Familiarity with API design, contract versioning, and developer-facing data platforms
Cloud-native experience (AWS preferred)
U.S. Citizenship required, with the ability to obtain TS/SCI clearance (not required day 1)
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with agile product and service development or similar product-led development processes
Familiarity with military, govtech, or other high-trust domains
Notice to Third Party Recruitment Agencies
Please note that Onebrief does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the absence of an executed Recruitment Services Agreement, there will be no obligation to any referral compensation or recruiter fee. In the event a recruiter or agency submits a resume or candidate without an agreement Onebrief explicitly reserves the right to pursue and hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted to hiring managers, shall be deemed the property of Onebrief.