Bloomreach is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead its Data Pipeline team, responsible for the backbone of data ingestion, real-time event tracking, and long-term data storage for Bloomreach Engagement. You will lead a high-performing team of 6–7 engineers in Central Europe or remotely, ensuring scalability and performance of systems processing billions of user events daily under growing enterprise demand.
What You'll Do
- Take ownership of the Data Pipeline team's delivery, ensuring tracking pipeline reliability, scalability, and performance under growing enterprise-scale traffic.
- Lead 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Gain understanding of company processes, team dynamics, the product, and the Data Pipeline domain — tracking, imports, EBQ, and key services within 30 days.
- Establish regular 1-on-1 meetings with all team members and key stakeholders (Product Manager, Tech Lead, peer EMs) within 30 days.
- Understand the current state of the tracking pipeline, key architectural challenges, and ongoing projects within 30 days.
- Participate in project preparation, cycle planning, and the prioritization process within 90 days.
- Balance feature completeness, technical quality, and delivery speed in project execution within 90 days.
- Ensure transparency in plans, progress, and findings — you are the team's voice to the organization within 90 days.
- Take full ownership of the team's L3 support process, on-call rotation, and incident management within 90 days.
- Set and support personal development goals for all team members within 180 days.
- Become a trusted partner in your domain — understanding the tracking pipeline deeply enough to make informed trade-off decisions and challenge technical proposals within 180 days.
- Identify and optimize efficient paths to achieve your goals and the goals of your team within 180 days.
- Drive measurable progress on the team's key technical challenges (tracking pipeline scalability, MongoDB pressure reduction, data consistency) within 180 days.
What We're Looking For
- 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.
- 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.
Nice to Have
- Experience with incident management and on-call processes is a plus.
Technical Stack
- Go
- Python
- Apache Kafka
- MongoDB
- BigQuery
- BigTable
- Redis
- Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
- Apache Spark
- DataProc
- IceBerg
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- HELM
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Victoria Metrics
- PagerDuty
- Sentry
- OpenTelemetry
- GitLab (CI/CD)
- Jira
- Confluence
- Productboard
- Robot Framework
Team & Environment
- Team size: 6–7 engineers
- Team structure: Includes a Staff Engineer / Tech Lead, Senior Engineers, SREs, Data Engineers, and a QA Engineer
Benefits & Compensation
- A great deal of freedom and trust — no clocking in and out, no corporate rules, no long approval processes.
- Flexible working hours to accommodate your working style.
- Virtual-first work environment with several Bloomreach Hubs available across three continents.
- Company events to experience the global spirit of the company and get excited about what's ahead.
- Employees can take 5 paid days off to volunteer.
- Participation in personal development workshops on various topics run by experts from inside the company.
- Access to a resident communication coach (Ivo Večeřa) to help navigate work-related communications & decision-making challenges.
- Managers are encouraged to participate in the Leader Development Program, which includes regular comprehensive feedback, consultations with a coach, and follow-up.
Work Mode
- Work type: hybrid
- Locations: Bratislava, Brno, Remote (full-time)
- Flexibility: Flexible working hours, remote-first environment
