Engineering Manager, Data Pipeline at Bloomreach

Bloomreach is building the world’s premier agentic platform for personalization.We’re revolutionizing how businesses connect with their customers, building and deploying AI agents to personalize the entire customer journey. • We're taking autonomous search mainstream, making product discovery more intuitive and conversational for customers, and more profitable for businesses. • We’re making conversational shopping a reality, connecting every shopper with tailored guidance and product expertise — available on demand, at every touchpoint in their journey. • We're designing the future of autonomous marketing, taking the work out of workflows, and reclaiming the creative, strategic, and customer-first work marketers were always meant to do. And we're building all of that on the intelligence of a single AI engine — Loomi AI — so that personalization isn't only autonomous…it's also consistent.From retail to financial services, hospitality to gaming, businesses use Bloomreach to drive higher growth and lasting loyalty. We power personalization for more than 1,400 global brands, including American Eagle, Sonepar, and Pandora. Become an Engineering Manager for Bloomreach! Lead our Data Pipeline team — the backbone of data ingestion, real-time event tracking, and long-term data storage for Bloomreach Engagement. Your leadership will directly impact how hundreds of millions of customer interactions are processed, routed, and stored every day across dozens of enterprise e-commerce and beyond-retail verticals. Working in one of our Central European offices (Bratislava or Brno) or from home on a full-time basis, you'll become a core part of the Engineering Team. What challenge awaits you? You will take over an established, high-performing Data Pipeline team of 6–7 engineers (including a Staff Engineer / Tech Lead, Senior Engineers, SREs, Data Engineers, and a QA Engineer) from the current Engineering Manager who is moving on to establish a new team. The team owns the hot-path tracking pipeline — the system that ingests, validates, routes, and processes all real-time customer events flowing into Bloomreach Engagement. With rapidly growing enterprise customers pushing traffic to new peaks, the tracking pipeline scalability is the team's #1 technical challenge. To give you a sense of scale: the platform processes billions of user events per day, peaking at 80–100K tracked actions per second during holiday seasons like Black Friday — with ~30% year-over-year growth. The pipeline targets sub-second data freshness for real-time use cases and must sustain this under heavy load from some of the world's largest e-commerce, gaming, and retail brands. Beyond scalability, the team drives key strategic initiatives such as Unified Tracking (a single tracking API serving both Engagement and Discovery), JWT-based Tracking API Security for enterprise clients, and the continuous improvement of data import and export pipelines. Your challenge will be to balance engineering excellence with product delivery — keeping a mature production system healthy and performant while simultaneously driving ambitious architectural improvements and cross-team projects involving 4+ engineering teams. Your job will be to: a. Guide the team in delivering and balancing new features and operational excellence • Take ownership of the Data Pipeline team's delivery, ensuring tracking pipeline reliability, scalability, and performance under growing enterprise-scale traffic. • Lead the team through architectural improvements to the hot-path tracking pipeline, including reducing MongoDB pressure, improving throughput, and addressing data consistency challenges (IMF/Mongo desyncs). • Clarify scope and help the team break down complex projects (like Unified Tracking, JWT Security, pipeline refactoring) into manageable increments with clear delivery milestones. • Assure engineering and quality best practices are applied throughout the development process — code reviews, automated testing (including Robot Framework E2E tests), observability, and incident readiness. • Balance feature delivery, technical debt reduction, and operational work (L3 support, on-call rotation, incident management) to keep the team effective and the system healthy. • Elevate team needs and guide them on how to address maintenance tasks, tech debt, and tasks addressing technical depth. b. Develop your team members • Manage a team of 6–7 engineers, coordinating the team to work towards a common goal, establishing a working plan, allocating resources, and assigning responsibilities. • Foster a culture of continuous learning, ownership, and improvement — providing opportunities for team members to develop their skills (e.g., knowledge-sharing sessions, squad demos, workshops). • Take responsibility for the personal development of your team members — providing regular feedback, setting growth goals, and guiding career progression through the Bloomreach career architecture framework. • Encourage team members to take ownership of their work, promoting accountability and a sense of pride in their contributions. • Recognize and celebrate the achievements of team members, fostering a positive and motivating work environment. c. Collaborate with wider Product and Engineering departments • Contribute to the product roadmap, helping to define the strategic direction and priorities for the Data Pipeline team within the CDE (Common Data Engine) organization. • Prepare for upcoming projects and participate in the cycle-based prioritization process to ensure efficient workflow and resource allocation. • Collaborate with the product team beyond the technical development and delivery process, assisting with product launch and adoption to ensure successful rollout and customer engagement. • Communicate and collaborate with other Engineering Managers and their teams (Web Experience, App Platform, Campaigns, Mobile SDK, Integrations, FUSE, and others), identifying and managing dependencies to ensure seamless integration and coordination — especially critical for cross-team projects like Unified Tracking and Tracking API Security. • Represent the team in various discussions with internal stakeholders, advocating for the team's interests and contributing to company-wide decision-making processes. What technologies and tools does the Data Pipeline team work with? • Programming languages — Go, Python • Messaging & streaming — Apache Kafka • Databases & storage — MongoDB, BigQuery, BigTable, Redis, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) • Data processing — Apache Spark, DataProc, IceBerg • Infrastructure — Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, HELM • Observability & operations — Grafana, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, PagerDuty, Sentry, OpenTelemetry • Software & tools — GitLab (CI/CD), Jira, Confluence, Productboard, Robot Framework The owned area encompasses domains such as real-time event tracking and ingestion, Unified Tracking API, data imports (file, SQL, cloud storage sources), customer ID resolution and merging, EBQ (long-term data export to BigQuery), and data streaming pipelines. Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and data pipeline design is highly valued. Your success story will be: In 30 Days: • Gain understanding of company processes, team dynamics, the product, and the Data Pipeline domain — tracking, imports, EBQ, and key services. • Establish regular 1-on-1 meetings with all team members and key stakeholders (Product Manager, Tech Lead, peer EMs). • Understand the current state of the tracking pipeline, key architectural challenges, and ongoing projects. In 90 Days: • Participate in project preparation, cycle planning, and the prioritization process. • Balance feature completeness, technical quality, and delivery speed in project execution. • Ensure transparency in plans, progress, and findings — you are the team's voice to the organization. • Take full ownership of the team's L3 support process, on-call rotation, and incident management. In 180 Days: • Set and support personal development goals for all team members. • Become a trusted partner in your domain — understanding the tracking pipeline deeply enough to make informed trade-off decisions and challenge technical proposals. • Identify and optimize efficient paths to achieve your goals and the goals of your team. • Drive measurable progress on the team's key technical challenges (tracking pipeline scalability, MongoDB pressure reduction, data consistency). You have the following experience and qualities: Professional experience • Proven experience as an Engineering Manager or similar leadership role in a backend / data engineering / distributed systems environment. • Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture — event-driven systems, message queues, databases, and high-throughput data pipelines. • Experience in leading a team in continuous delivery and testing, ensuring high-quality output. • Demonstrated ability to contribute to product roadmaps and strategic direction — you can balance business priorities with technical needs. • Experience in preparing for and participating in project planning and prioritization processes. • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to break down complex situations and evaluate alternative solutions. • Strong knowledge of software architecture principles and practices. • Experience with Agile methodologies and cycle-based planning. • Experience with incident management and on-call processes is a plus. Personal qualities • Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to tailor communication to diverse audiences (engineers, PMs, leadership) and build consensus. • Proactive and persistent — you take initiative, seize opportunities, and drive things to completion. • Ability to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement within a team. • Strong leadership skills — you set personal development goals for team members and guide them on their career paths. • Ability to balance feature completeness, technical quality, and speed of delivery in project execution. • Ability to identify and optimize efficient paths to achieve personal and team goals. • Comfortable operating in a remote-first environment with distributed teams across Central Europe. #LI-KP1 More things you'll like about Bloomreach: Culture: • A great deal of freedom and trust. At Bloomreach we don’t clock in and out, and we have neither corporate rules nor long approval processes. This freedom goes hand in hand with responsibility. We are interested in results from day one. • We have defined our 5 values and the 10 underlying key behaviors that we strongly believe in. We can only succeed if everyone lives these behaviors day to day. We've embedded them in our processes like recruitment, onboarding, feedback, personal development, performance review and internal communication. • We believe in flexible working hours to accommodate your working style. • We work virtual-first with several Bloomreach Hubs available across three continents. • We organize company events to experience the global spirit of the company and get excited about what's ahead. • We encourage and support our employees to engage in volunteering activities - every Bloomreacher can take 5 paid days off to volunteer*. • The Bloomreach Glassdoor page elaborates on our stellar 4.4/5 rating. The Bloomreach Comparably page Culture score is even higher at 4.9/5 Personal Development: • We have a People Development Program -- participating in personal development workshops on various topics run by experts from inside the company. We are continuously developing & updating competency maps for select functions. • Our resident communication coach Ivo Večeřa is available to help navigate work-related communications & decision-making challenges.* • Our managers are strongly encouraged to participate in the Leader Development Program to develop in the areas we consider essential for any leader. The program includes regular comprehensive feedback, consultations with a coach and follow-up check-ins. • Bloomreachers utilize the $1,500 professional education budget on an annual basis to purchase education products (books, courses, certifications, etc.)* Well-being: • The Employee Assistance Program -- with counselors -- is available for non-work-related challenges.* • Subscription to Calm - sleep and meditation app.* • We organize ‘DisConnect’ days where Bloomreachers globally enjoy one additional day off each quarter, allowing us to unwind together and focus on activities away from the screen with our loved ones. • We facilitate sports, yoga, and meditation opportunities for each other. • Extended parental leave up to 26 calendar weeks for Primary Caregivers.* Compensation: • Restricted Stock Units or Stock Options are granted depending on a team member’s role, seniority, and location.* • Everyone gets to participate in the company's success through the company performance bonus.* • We offer an employee referral bonus of up to $3,000 paid out immediately after the new hire starts. • We reward & celebrate work anniversaries -- Bloomversaries!* (*Subject to employment type. Interns are exempt from marked benefits, usually for the first 6 months.) Excited? Join us and transform the future of commerce experiences! If this position doesn't suit you, but you know someone who might be a great fit, share it - we will be very grateful! Any unsolicited resumes/candidate profiles submitted through our website or to personal email accounts of employees of Bloomreach are considered property of Bloomreach and are not subject to payment of agency fees. #LI-Remote