Data Engineering Manager, Audience Lifecycle

About this role

OVERVIEW

A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.

Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR . This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

Intro to Position

Do you want to play a major role in the future of public media? Do you have a passion for data infrastructure technology, open-source software, and serving the public?

As our Audience Lifecycle Software Engineering Manager on the Audience Technology team, you will lead a highly collaborative team of software engineers building, testing, and delivering award-winning features for NPR's flagship audience lifecycle technologies including our data warehouse, data pipeline tools, business intelligence, and personalization technology. You will partner closely with our Product, Design, Data, and Editorial teams to identify priorities, architect new features, and continuously improve existing applications. In this role, you will act as a primary champion of team health, career progression, and technical excellence.

Responsibilities

• People Leadership & Coaching: Manage, mentor, and coach a team of Software Engineers, actively investing in their career growth, professional development, and psychological safety.

• Talent Acquisition & Onboarding: Lead recruitment and hiring efforts for software engineering vacancies on your team, and manage the structured onboarding and training of new engineering staff.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, UX designers, data analysts, and editorial partners across all stages of the product development lifecycle.

• Agile Delivery Management: Lead the technical planning, scoping, and execution of future software projects, facilitating Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, backlog refinements, sprint planning, and retrospectives) as needed.

• Technical Quality & Code Review: Conduct thorough software design and code reviews, providing constructive and substantive feedback to maintain code health, architectural integrity, and security standards.

• Continuous Process Improvement: Analyze, propose, and implement engineering workflow improvements to enhance the speed, safety, and quality of software delivery.

• Developer Experience Automation: Identify common engineering blockers and pain points, writing helper tools or automation scripts to optimize team developer experience (DX).

• Incident & Production Support: Oversee and coordinate the team's response to critical production bugs or infrastructure incidents.

• Vendor & Contributor Management: Coordinate workflows, code standards, and deliverables for external contributors and specialized development vendors.

The above duties and responsibilities are not an exhaustive list of required responsibilities, duties and skills. Other duties may be assigned, and this job description can be modified at any time.

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience directly managing, mentoring, or leading data engineers within an agile organization.

• Prior experience as an individual contributor in engineering, testing, and shipping robust code for at least one large-scale data application or service.

• Demonstrated experience collaborating within cross-functional Agile/Scrum product teams.

• Experience with GCP, AWS or other similar cloud computing platforms.

• Experience managing high availability, distributed and fault tolerant applications, services and APIs.

• Proficiency in SQL and at least one other general purpose programming language such as Python.

• Hands-on experience working with modern version control systems (primarily Git).

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional experience managing both internal employees and external agency vendors/contractors.

• Experience implementing, managing and maintaining data lakes, data warehouses and data ingestion pipelines.

• Experience working with and managing large datasets in platforms such as Salesforce, BigQuery and Looker.

• Experience with audience segmentation, targeting systems, or marketing data infrastructure at scale.

• Strong interpersonal skills with a focus on leadership of cross functional teams.

• Proven ability to manage multiple projects effectively and succeed in a fast-paced environment.

Required Skills/Competencies

• Technical Design & Communication: Ability to translate complex technical concepts, system architectures, and engineering trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

• Inclusive Leadership: Demonstrated competency in fostering an equitable, supportive, and inclusive team culture.

• Systemic Problem Solving: Strong analytical skill set with an "automation-first" mindset for resolving manual bottlenecks and production issues.

• User-Centric Empathy: A strong focus on quality and empathy for end-users, ensuring highly performant, accessible application experiences.

• Agile Operations: Deep fluency in Agile methodologies and software project delivery management.

Education Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical work experience.

Work Location & Requirements

• NPR Remote-Permitted : This is a remote-permitted role. This role is based out of our Washington, D.C. office, but the employee may choose to work on a remote basis

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