Manager, Data Engineering

About Iru

Iru is the AI-powered security & IT platform used by the world’s fastest-growing companies to secure their users, apps, and devices. Built for the AI era, Iru unifies identity & access, endpoint security & management, and compliance automation—collapsing the stack and giving IT & security time and control back. Iru is backed by some of the smartest investors in tech—General Catalyst, Tiger Global, Felicis, Greycroft, and First Round Capital.

In July 2024, Iru raised $100 million from General Catalyst, valuing the company at $850 million. Customers include Notion, Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Mercor, and Iru partners with industry leaders such as Service Now and AWS. Iru was named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startup Employers 2025 list for employee engagement and satisfaction.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Data Engineering team. This is a player‑coach role: you’ll manage and grow the team while staying hands‑on with technical work yourself. Expect to spend 40–60% of your time designing, building, and reviewing pipelines, models, and infrastructure alongside the team. You’ll report to the Director of Data and partner directly with stakeholders across the business to ensure our data platform keeps pace with the company’s growth.

This role is high‑leverage. The systems you build and the decisions you make will shape how the entire company—and our AI capabilities—understands its products, customers, and performance.

The Data Engineering team owns the infrastructure and pipelines that power data‑driven decisions across the company. We ingest, transform, and deliver centralized data from every product in our portfolio—making it possible for Data Science, Analytics, Finance, Revenue, and our product engineering teams to move fast and trust what they see. Our work is foundational to the company’s AI and machine learning initiatives.

The quality, freshness, and structure of the data we deliver directly determines what’s possible for the models and systems built on top of it. If you want to create leverage for AI at scale, this is where it starts. Our stack includes Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt, Python, SQL, AWS. We’re at an inflection point: the foundation has been built, and now we need leadership to drive the next chapter—modernizing our architecture, raising the bar on data quality, and scaling how we partner with the rest of the org.

• Set technical direction
• Drive architectural improvements to how we ingest, transform, and serve data—improving latency, reliability, and data freshness across the platform
• Strengthen our transformation layers with clear ownership, data quality checks, and well‑defined contracts between stages
• Improve our data modeling practices so downstream teams can query confidently
• Lead and grow the team
• Manage, mentor, and develop a nimble team of data engineers
• Build a culture of ownership, quality, speed, and continuous improvement
  
  Create clarity around priorities, ship cadence, and how the team operates
• Partner across the org
• Work upstream with product engineering to influence how data models are designed in application databases—so they work well with centralized data workflows from day one
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for stakeholder requests, ensuring projects are scoped and architected before work begins
• Build strong relationships with teams across the company to understand their needs and deliver data they can trust
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We’d Love to Hear From You if You Have
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership or management role
• Strong hands‑on experience with modern data tools
• Deep understanding of data modeling and pipeline architecture patterns
• Experience designing and operating reliable data pipelines at scale
• Ability to switch between strategic planning, people leadership, and hands‑on technical contribution
• Clear communication skills—you can translate between technical teams and business stakeholders
• Ability to think through problems from the ground up
Nice To Haves, But NOT Required
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, CDC, or…