Engineering Manager, Data Platform

About the role

This position is responsible for leading the Events Analytics Platform (EAP) team, which serves as the central hub for how Sentry stores, queries, and analyzes all event data for over 4 million developers. The role focuses on enabling efficient debugging across massive and complex datasets, which is essential for Sentry's evolution into a unified telemetry platform. You will be instrumental in guiding the architectural development and ensuring the long-term stability of this critical data infrastructure. The position plays a key role in supporting Sentry's future AI initiatives, including projects like Seer, by preparing the platform for advanced capabilities. You will own the technical strategy and execution for the EAP team's core mission. The role requires balancing the immediate need for system reliability with the long-term goals of architectural evolution. You will ensure the platform continues to deliver high performance and scalability under heavy loads. Ultimately, this role shapes the foundation that allows developers to gain insights from their telemetry data effectively.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Cultivate and expand a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership and impact within the data organization.
• Define the technical and strategic direction for the team, balancing the necessity of immediate platform stability with forward-looking architectural goals.
• Oversee the development of core EAP features, including the implementation of complex analytical queries, dynamic routing mechanisms, storage/compute separation strategies, and modern analytical storage solutions.
• Ensure EAP can handle the demands of AI agents and MCP servers to enable new AI capabilities and maintain competitive tooling.
• Guide the consolidation of all event data into EAP, enabling fast and complex cross-event querying at scale without sacrificing performance.
• Collaborate closely with Product Engineering, Streaming, Production Engineering, Security, and Compliance teams to align on priorities and share best practices.
• Lead the team through critical incidents, postmortems, and scaling challenges, promoting a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement.
• Build and maintain a healthy and collaborative team culture that focuses on professional growth, individual accountability, and inclusion.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies and methodologies to improve the efficiency and resilience of the data platform.
• Act as a key stakeholder in major architectural decisions that impact the broader engineering organization and product strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers and staff engineers, helping them advance their technical and leadership skills.
• Partner with Product Managers to translate business requirements into robust technical specifications and execution plans.
• Monitor platform health and performance metrics, driving initiatives to improve reliability and user experience.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing across the engineering organization to ensure the team's expertise benefits the entire company.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of industry experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of delivering complex systems.
• 4 or more years of experience in people management, including demonstrated success in career development and performance management.
• Strong technical background in data platforms, storage systems, or analytical backends, with a deep understanding of core concepts.
• Experience with distributed systems, query optimization, or scaling data-intensive workloads in production environments.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of explaining intricate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences effectively.
• A history of making sound technical decisions that balance trade-offs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive in a fast-paced, startup-like environment while managing multiple priorities.
• Commitment to writing clean, maintainable code and advocating for engineering best practices across the team.
• Willingness to engage in hands-on technical work, including code reviews and debugging complex issues alongside the engineering team.
• Alignment with Sentry's mission to help developers write better software faster and improve the state of software development.

Nice to have

• Proficiency in Python, Rust, or a similar programming language to understand implementation details and contribute technically.
• Familiarity with observability, developer tools, or event-driven systems, which are relevant to the platform's integration points.

Skills & tools

• ClickHouse
• Pinot
• Druid
• Python
• Rust

Practical notes

Sentry offers comprehensive employee benefits, including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance. Sentry is committed to equal employment opportunities and provides reasonable accommodations for disabilities. The role is based in San Francisco, California, and operates on a hybrid schedule. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position. The compensation range for this role is $220,000 - $300,000 USD annually, reflecting the seniority and impact of the position.