Engineering Manager – Foundational Data Systems for AI
ENGINEERING MANAGER — FOUNDATIONAL DATA SYSTEMS FOR AI
Location: Downtown Mountain View, CA (office-based, 5 days/week)
Team: Foundational Data Systems
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re hiring an Engineering Manager (Hands-on TLM) to lead Granica’s Foundational Data Systems—the core infrastructure layer that everything else depends on.
You’ll lead a globally distributed team of ~15–20 senior engineers across the US, India, and Canada, with direct ownership of long-lived systems spanning storage, metadata, and distributed compute.
This is not a people-only management role. It is a hands-on technical leadership position requiring regular participation in architecture reviews, system design, debugging complex distributed systems issues, and occasional coding.
You will help design and operate the core infrastructure behind Granica’s open-table data systems, working with formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Parquet.
Deep experience with open table formats and their internals—including metadata layers, transaction commits, compaction, schema evolution, and table maintenance—is strongly preferred.
The systems this team builds determine whether Granica can translate cutting-edge research into reliable products and whether our customers can trust the data foundations their analytics and AI workloads depend on.
This role is ideal for a technically strong leader who enjoys building teams, designing durable distributed systems, and operating infrastructure that must be correct and efficient at enterprise scale.
WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
Modern AI and analytics systems are constrained less by models and more by the inefficiency and fragility of the data infrastructure beneath them.
Redundant data layouts, brittle metadata layers, and expensive execution paths translate directly into:
- higher infrastructure costs
- slower iteration cycles
- operational fragility
Granica’s mission is to remove that inefficiency at the foundation.
We design self-optimizing data s...