Engineering Manager – Foundational Data Systems for AI

📋 Description

• • Granica Inc. is seeking a highly skilled and technically adept Engineering Manager to lead our Foundational Data Systems team. This is a critical, hands-on technical leadership role (TLM) focused on building and operating the core infrastructure that underpins all of Granica's data products and AI initiatives. You will be instrumental in shaping the future of how enterprises manage and leverage their data for advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.
• • As the leader of the Foundational Data Systems team, you will have direct ownership of long-lived, complex systems encompassing storage, metadata management, and distributed compute. This team is responsible for the very bedrock of Granica's offerings, ensuring that cutting-edge research can be translated into reliable, scalable, and trustworthy products.
• • This position requires a leader who is not only adept at managing and growing a globally distributed team of approximately 15-20 senior engineers across the US, India, and Canada, but also deeply involved in the technical aspects of system design, architecture reviews, and complex debugging. Expect to spend a significant portion of your time (~30-40%) actively engaged in technical problem-solving, including occasional coding, to ensure the robustness and efficiency of our systems.
• • You will play a pivotal role in designing and operating the core infrastructure that supports Granica's open-table data systems, working extensively with industry-standard formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Parquet. A strong preference will be given to candidates with deep expertise in the internals of these open table formats, including their metadata layers, transaction commit mechanisms, data compaction strategies, schema evolution capabilities, and table maintenance processes.
• • The systems you and your team build are fundamental to Granica's success. They dictate our ability to deliver on the promise of efficient, reliable, and reversible data evolution for our customers. This role is perfect for a technically strong leader who thrives on building high-performing teams, architecting durable distributed systems, and operating mission-critical infrastructure at enterprise scale.
• • The impetus for this role stems from the current limitations in modern AI and analytics systems, which are often bottlenecked by inefficient and fragile data infrastructure. Issues like redundant data layouts, brittle metadata, and costly execution paths lead directly to increased infrastructure expenses, slower development cycles, and operational instability. Granica's mission is to eliminate these inefficiencies at the foundational level.
• • Your team will design and implement self-optimizing data systems that continuously reorganize, compress, and maintain structured data, ensuring it remains efficient, reliable, and reversible as it evolves. These systems will serve as the durable substrate for analytics, automation, and AI workloads, where absolute correctness, clear provenance, and robust governance are paramount.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to collaborate closely with Granica's Research group, led by Prof. Andrea Montanari from Stanford. You will be at the forefront of translating groundbreaking advances in information theory and learning efficiency into production-grade distributed systems. We firmly believe that the next significant leap forward in AI will be driven by superior systems and data management, rather than solely by larger models.
• • Key responsibilities will include setting the technical direction through rigorous design reviews, RFC processes, and making principled architectural trade-offs. You will own the evolution of critical foundational systems, including table maintenance and data layout optimization, metadata services and transaction management, schema evolution and versioning, distributed compute orchestration, and the development of robust reliability, observability, and operational tooling.
• • These systems will operate on petabyte-scale datasets, demanding strict adherence to requirements for correctness, durability, and efficiency. You will translate strategic objectives into actionable execution plans, establishing clear roadmaps and milestones. Furthermore, you will champion engineering standards for correctness, reliability, and cost-efficiency, lead incident response efforts, conduct thorough postmortems, and drive continuous system improvements.
• • Operational excellence is a cornerstone of this role. You will be responsible for operating infrastructure where data integrity and durability are non-negotiable. Cross-functional partnership will be essential, requiring close collaboration with Research, Applied Systems, Product, and Infrastructure teams to ensure seamless integration and efficient movement of ideas from theoretical concepts to production-ready solutions, all while preserving system integrity. You will act as a vital technical and organizational bridge between our research endeavors and engineering execution.