Manager, Software Engineering (Data)

Who We Are

At Firstup, our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world’s workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily. Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology. Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent.

Our Values

• Every employee is an owner with responsibility and credit for our progress.
• Leadership is in our build and we see change as a catalyst for improvement.
• We win as a team, committed to help our coworkers and customers thrive.

Job Summary

We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineering Manager (Data) to join our team! You will have opportunities to work with customers to solve technology challenges. We are quickly growing and you will deliver new solutions and services while always improving our approach to architecture, scale, availability and fault-tolerance. Engineering is a craft, and at Firstup we believe the internals of our technology are as elegant as user experience. Teams are empowered and supported to make an impact every day. We work in autonomous product teams, and you’ll work with Product Managers, Designers, QA, and other engineers on a daily basis. You will partner with others across the company in shared codebases, and contribute directly to other services when needed. We iterate quickly to see what works and what doesn’t and follow the data to bring our strategy. We encourage you to take chances and fail because that is how we grow. We are a distributed team and have been since day 1. In this role you really can work where you want within the United States.

Responsibilities

• Drive the strategy, design, and delivery of scalable data platforms powering business intelligence, predictive analytics, and LLM capabilities across enterprise customers, built on modern microservices architecture.
• Drive the successful completion of complex projects that span multiple domain teams as data is core to our platform.
• Provide senior technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, and code reviews, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Drive the thoughtful adoption of Generative AI tools and coding agents to increase developer productivity, improve code quality, and accelerate innovation.
• Partner closely with Product Management and Design to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Manage, mentor, and grow a distributed team of software and quality engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Own production health for your teams’ services, including on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews in a “you build it, you run it” environment.
• Lead operational excellence initiatives to improve observability, resiliency, automation, and alignment with defined SLOs and enterprise SLAs.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field of study; or commensurate professional experience required.
• 10+ years of professional software experience, including 3+ years managing teams of engineers developing data pipelines and analytics applications.
• Proven experience delivering customer-facing Enterprise SaaS products at scale.
• Strong hands-on or architectural experience with modern data platform tooling, including but not limited to Apache Airflow, dbt, Kafka, AWS Glue, AWS Redshift, AWS Sagemaker, AWS Dynamo, AWS Quick Sight.
• Success leading a data engineering team through complex challenges that are large in scope.
• Strong knowledge of modern data architecture, ETL/ELT processes, and data modeling best practices.
• Strong knowledge of SQL, Python and TypeScript.
• Knowledge of AI tools including Langchain, Open AI Agents, and MCP APIs.
• Excellent communication skills and understanding of the realities of developing in a startup environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling and evolving Enterprise SaaS platforms through periods of growth or technical transformation.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Generative AI tools and coding agents in software development workflows.
• Exposure to HR Tech or other regulated enterprise domains.

Firstup expects the base salary for this role to be between $160,000-$195,000. The starting rate of pay may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, position offered, location, education, training, and/or experience.

Why Firstup?

Because you care - about people, the work you do, and the connections you make. Work is such a large part of life; it only makes sense to make it awesome. If you want to engage brilliant minds in a high-growth and inclusive environment where ideas are rewarded regardless of who they come from, join us. This is a rapidly changing space so if you thrive on ambiguity, are hungry for a challenge, and have the guts to speak your mind, you could be a perfect fit. We offer an excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work, and a leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.

Firstup is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants for employment and to all employees, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, protected disability, veteran status or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state or local laws.