Senior Engineering Manager, Data Pipeline

Become an Engineering Manager for Bloomreach!

Lead our Data Pipeline team — the backbone of data ingestion, real-time event tracking, and long-term data storage for Bloomreach Engagement. Your leadership will directly impact how hundreds of millions of customer interactions are processed, routed, and stored every day across dozens of enterprise e-commerce and beyond-retail verticals.

Your starting salary will be from 6 000 € per month, along with stock options and other benefits. Working in one of our Central European offices (Bratislava or Brno) or from home on a full-time basis, you'll become a core part of the Engineering Team.

What challenge awaits you?

You will take over an established, high-performing Data Pipeline team of 6–7 engineers (including a Staff Engineer / Tech Lead, Senior Engineers, SREs, Data Engineers, and a QA Engineer) from the current Engineering Manager who is moving on to establish a new team.

The team owns the hot-path tracking pipeline — the system that ingests, validates, routes, and processes all real-time customer events flowing into Bloomreach Engagement. With rapidly growing enterprise customers pushing traffic to new peaks, the tracking pipeline scalability is the team's #1 technical challenge. To give you a sense of scale: the platform processes billions of user events per day, peaking at 80–100K tracked actions per second during holiday seasons like Black Friday — with ~30% year-over-year growth. The pipeline targets sub-second data freshness for real-time use cases and must sustain this under heavy load from some of the world's largest e-commerce, gaming, and retail brands.

Beyond scalability, the team drives key strategic initiatives such as Unified Tracking (a single tracking API serving both Engagement and Discovery), JWT-based Tracking API Security for enterprise clients, and the continuous improvement of data import and export pipelines.

Your challenge will be to balance engineering excellence with product delivery — keeping a mature production system healthy and performant while simultaneously driving ambitious architectural improvements and cross-team projects involving 4+ engineering teams.

Your job will be to:

a. Guide the team in delivering and balancing new features and operational excellence

• Take ownership of the Data Pipeline team's delivery, ensuring tracking pipeline reliability, scalability, and performance under growing enterprise-scale traffic.
• Lead the team through architectural improvements to the hot-path tracking pipeline, including reducing MongoDB pressure, improving throughput, and addressing data consistency challenges (IMF/Mongo desyncs).
• Clarify scope and help the team break down complex projects (like Unified Tracking, JWT Security, pipeline refactoring) into manageable increments with clear delivery milestones.
• Assure engineering and quality best practices are applied throughout the development process — code reviews, automated testing (including Robot Framework E2E tests), observability, and incident readiness.
• Balance feature delivery, technical debt reduction, and operational work (L3 support, on-call rotation, incident management) to keep the team effective and the system healthy.
• Elevate team needs and guide them on how to address maintenance tasks, tech debt, and tasks addressing technical depth.

b. Develop your team members

• Manage a team of 6–7 engineers, coordinating the team to work towards a common goal, establishing a working plan, allocating resources, and assigning responsibilities.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, ownership, and improvement — providing opportunities for team members to develop their skills (e.g., knowledge-sharing sessions, squad demos, workshops).
• Take responsibility for the personal development of your team members — providing regular feedback, setting growth goals, and guiding career progression through the Bloomreach career architecture framework.
• Encourage team members to take ownership of their work, promoting accountability and a sense of pride in their contributions.
• Recognize and celebrate the achievements of team members, fostering a positive and motivating work environment.

c. Collaborate with wider Product and Engineering departments

• Contribute to the product roadmap, helping to define the strategic direction and priorities for the Data Pipeline team within the CDE (Common Data Engine) organization.
• Prepare for upcoming projects and participate in the cycle-based prioritization process to ensure efficient workflow and resource allocation.
• Collaborate with the product team beyond the technical development and delivery process, assisting with product launch and adoption to ensure successful rollout and customer engagement.
• Communicate and collaborate with other Engineering Managers and their teams (Web Experience, App Platform, Campaigns, Mobile SDK, Integrations, FUSE, and others), identifying and managing dependencies to ensure seamless integration and coordination — especially critical for cross-team projects like Unified Tracking and Tracking API Security.
• Represent the team in various discussions with internal stakeholders, advocating for the team's interests and contributing to company-wide decision-making processes.

What technologies and tools does the Data Pipeline team work with?

• Programming languages — Go, Python
• Messaging & streaming — Apache Kafka
• Databases & storage — MongoDB, BigQuery, BigTable, Redis, Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
• Data processing — Apache Spark, DataProc, IceBerg
• Infrastructure — Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, HELM
• Observability & operations — Grafana, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, PagerDuty, Sentry, OpenTelemetry
• Software & tools — GitLab (CI/CD), Jira, Confluence, Productboard, Robot Framework

The owned area encompasses domains such as real-time event tracking and ingestion, Unified Tracking API, data imports (file, SQL, cloud storage sources), customer ID resolution and merging, EBQ (long-term data export to BigQuery), and data streaming pipelines. Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and data pipeline design is highly valued.

Your success story will be:

In 30 Days:

• Gain understanding of company processes, team dynamics, the product, and the Data Pipeline domain — tracking, imports, EBQ, and key services.
• Establish regular 1-on-1 meetings with all team members and key stakeholders (Product Manager, Tech Lead, peer EMs).
• Understand the current state of the tracking pipeline, key architectural challenges, and ongoing projects.

In 90 Days:

• Participate in project preparation, cycle planning, and the prioritization process.
• Balance feature completeness, technical quality, and delivery speed in project execution.
• Ensure transparency in plans, progress, and findings — you are the team's voice to the organization.
• Take full ownership of the team's L3 support process, on-call rotation, and incident management.

In 180 Days:

• Set and support personal development goals for all team members.
• Become a trusted partner in your domain — understanding the tracking pipeline deeply enough to make informed trade-off decisions and challenge technical proposals.
• Identify and optimize efficient paths to achieve your goals and the goals of your team.
• Drive measurable progress on the team's key technical challenges (tracking pipeline scalability, MongoDB pressure reduction, data consistency).

You have the following experience and qualities:

Professional experience

• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager or similar leadership role in a backend / data engineering / distributed systems environment.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture — event-driven systems, message queues, databases, and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Experience in leading a team in continuous delivery and testing, ensuring high-quality output.
• Demonstrated ability to contribute to product roadmaps and strategic direction — you can balance business priorities with technical needs.
• Experience in preparing for and participating in project planning and prioritization processes.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to break down complex situations and evaluate alternative solutions.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture principles and practices.
• Experience with Agile methodologies and cycle-based planning.
• Experience with incident management and on-call processes is a plus.

Personal qualities

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to tailor communication to diverse audiences (engineers, PMs, leadership) and build consensus.
• Proactive and persistent — you take initiative, seize opportunities, and drive things to completion.
• Ability to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement within a team.
• Strong leadership skills — you set personal development goals for team members and guide them on their career paths.
• Ability to balance feature completeness, technical quality, and speed of delivery in project execution.
• Ability to identify and optimize efficient paths to achieve personal and team goals.
• Comfortable operating in a remote-first environment with distributed teams across Central Europe.

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