Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering

ROLE OVERVIEW
SolarWinds is hiring a Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering to build and lead the team responsible for administering and configuring the Enterprise Data tech stack — Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau. This person will set technical direction and architecture standards across the platform, and build, coach, and grow the team that executes day to day.

This is a working-manager (player-coach) role, not a pure people-management position: the team is small today, and this person is expected to stay technically close to the platform — setting patterns and making architecture calls, and personally covering tech-stack administration the team hasn't yet grown to cover — while delegating hands-on execution to their report(s) where it exists.
You'll balance hands-on technical leadership with people management — coaching your team, setting goals, and representing the platform in cross-functional planning with adjacent teams.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Team leadership & people management

• Lead, coach, and grow the Data Platform Engineering team — starting with one direct report, with a plan to scale as workload and budget allow.
• Run regular 1:1s, set clear goals, and manage performance and career development for direct report(s).
• Own hiring for the team as it grows, partnering with People and the hiring committee on leveling and comp.

Platform architecture & technical direction

• Own architecture standards and technical roadmap across the Enterprise Data tech stack — Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau.
• Make build-vs-buy and platform-pattern decisions that shape how the team executes day to day.
• Stay hands-on enough to unblock the team on hard technical problems, without personally owning routine operational work.

Data tech stack administration & configuration

• Ensure Fivetran, BigQuery, Dataplex, dbt, and Tableau are properly administered and configured — access, environments, and platform settings across the stack.
• Own dbt Cloud platform administration (environments, scheduling, CI/CD, access); model development and transformation logic remain with Data Engineering.
• Own Tableau platform administration (user access, groups, permissions, licensing), scaling this to a dedicated hire as the team grows.
• Set and maintain configuration standards so the stack stays consistent, secure, and auditable as the team scales.

Execution oversight

• Ensure the team's reliability, cost, and governance commitments — across ingestion, BigQuery, Dataplex/PII access, dbt, and Tableau — are being met.
• Review and prioritise the team's operational backlog against the platform roadmap.

Cross-functional partnership

• Represent the Data Platform Engineering pillar in planning with Data Engineering, Data Governance, Cloud Security, and Business Intelligence.
• Negotiate priorities and dependencies with adjacent teams on the team's behalf, rather than leaving individual engineers to manage those relationships alone.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE

Technical depth

• Deep, hands-on background in Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, and Dataplex — enough to retain technical credibility and keep setting standards for the team.
• Hands-on experience administering and configuring dbt (or a comparable transformation platform) and Fivetran (or a comparable ELT tool).
• Experience administering Tableau or a comparable BI platform — permissions, licensing, and platform configuration.
• Track record of technical leadership — driving standards, mentoring engineers, or leading initiatives — even without formal management experience.

Leadership experience

• Experience or demonstrated readiness to lead a technical team — formal people-management experience is helpful but not required.
• Demonstrated ability to balance architecture/strategic work with hands-on operational realities.
• Strong communication skills — able to represent the team's priorities and trade-offs to peers and senior leadership.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• Prior experience leading or mentoring a technical team, even informally (tech lead, staff-level mentorship, project leadership).
• Experience scaling a team from one or two people to a larger group.