Data Engineering Manager

About the role

Join Afresh, a mission-driven company focused on reducing food waste in grocery stores. As the Data Engineering Manager, you will lead a team responsible for integrating customers onto Afresh's platform and continuously improving the integration processes. You will own the full lifecycle of customer data integrations, build core dataflows for new products, and drive integration execution and velocity. This is a hands-on management role that requires strong technical skills, experience in engineering management, and a passion for AI-augmented engineering workflows. Key missions: Lead and grow a team of data engineers, providing mentorship, technical guidance, and career development support.. Own execution of customer integrations across multiple product lines, ensuring integrations are delivered on time and at a high quality bar.. Drive integration velocity: improve the speed and predictability of getting new customers from raw data landing to production-ready. Profile: - We encourage all highly-qualified candidates to apply, even if they don't meet every listed qualification - Demonstrated ability to improve team velocity through better tooling, process improvements, or automation - Strong technical background in data engineering: experience with Python, PySpark, SQL, dbt, Airflow, and modern data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar) - Experience managing execution across multiple concurrent projects with different customers or stakeholders, balancing competing priorities with clear communication - Track record of shipping high-quality data integrations or ETL systems at scale, and a deep understanding of what makes data pipelines reliable - 3+ years of engineering management experience - Genuine enthusiasm for AI-augmented engineering workflows. You've experimented with AI coding tools, agentic workflows, or similar approaches, and you have a vision for how they can transform data engineering and uplevel the team - Comfort working with messy, real-world data from enterprise customers, and the pragmatism to ship solutions that work without over-engineering - Strong collaboration skills: you're effective working across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams in a fast-paced environment - Prior experience at a high-growth startup navigating rapid customer expansion - Experience in grocery, retail, or supply chain data domains