Manager, Data Platform Engineering

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">We&nbsp;take play seriously. We’re looking for curious adventurers ready to find their party, fueled by imagination&nbsp;and drive&nbsp;to build what’s never been built before. At Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, you’ll collaborate with passionate teams to reimagine our iconic brands and create experiences that spark joy, connection, and community through the magic of play. This is your chance to shape legendary play that lasts a lifetime.</span></p></div><p>We're looking for a Manager to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure, platform, frameworks, and tools that power data and analytics across the company. This team builds and operates the shared platform that data engineers, analytics engineers, data scientists, and ML engineers depend on every day, and which provides the critical substrate for an AI native enterprise.</p> <p>This is a hands-on leadership role at an inflection point. The platform has grown organically alongside the business, and we're now ready to be far more intentional about it: fewer, better-supported capabilities; clearer standards; a simpler operating footprint. You'll lead a team of platform engineers through that evolution, setting technical direction, growing the people on the team, and building the organizational alignment that makes real change stick.</p> <p>If you're energized by taking capable platforms and turning them into a coherent product that other teams love using, this role is for you.</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Do:</strong></h2> <h3>LEAD AND GROW THE TEAM</h3> <ul> <li>Manage, coach, and develop a team of data platform engineers spanning early-career through senior levels.</li> <li>Run a healthy engineering practice: clear priorities and process, diligent code review, sustainable support, and blameless retrospectives that produce continuous improvement.</li> <li>Own hiring and team design as the platform's scope grows, assessing where you need depth or breadth and making great hires.</li> <li>Create development paths for your engineers, and establish real ownership of the platform and its components within the team.</li> </ul> <h3>SET PLATFORM STRATEGY AND DRIVE STANDARDIZATION</h3> <ul> <li>Treat the platform as a product: define what we offer, who it serves, what's supported, and what isn't.</li> <li>Establish a set of standard, well-documented platform offerings - the default path most teams should take - and drive adoption across data engineering, analytics, and AI.</li> <li>Assess the current tooling landscape, identify where capabilities overlap or duplicate one another, and build a prioritized plan to consolidate onto a smaller, better-supported set.</li> <li>Own the full lifecycle of platform capabilities, including the harder work: deprecating what we no longer want to support and shepherding consumers through migration.</li> <li>Balance central standards against genuine team-specific needs, and know when to hold the line versus grant a well-reasoned exception.</li> </ul> <h3>OWN THE TARGET-STATE ARCHITECTURE</h3> <ul> <li>Develop a clear, defensible point of view on where our data platform architecture should land, and build alignment behind it with engineering leadership and partner teams.</li> <li>Lead the team through significant platform evolution - consolidating overlapping capabilities, simplifying our cloud footprint, and migrating workloads between environments - with minimal disruption to the teams that depend on us.</li> <li>Make and document architectural decisions with explicit reasoning on cost, capability, operational burden, and long-term maintainability.</li> <li>Guide the team's infrastructure-as-code practice (Terraform) so that platform changes are reviewable, repeatable, and reversible.</li> </ul> <h3>DRIVE RELIABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND COST DISCIPLINE</h3> <ul> <li>Own the reliability of the data platform: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and the improvements that reduce recurrence.</li> <li>Establish the operational metrics that matter — availability, pipeline freshness, query performance, cost per workload — and manage the team against them.</li> <li>Own platform spend. FinOps is important here - you should understand where the money goes, forecast it credibly, and make deliberate tradeoffs between cost and capability.</li> <li>Hold a high bar for documentation, runbooks, and operational readiness as a condition of shipping.</li> </ul> <h3>PARTNER ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION</h3> <ul> <li>Build strong working relationships with data engineering, analytics, BI, AI, and ML teams; understand their workflows well enough to anticipate what they'll need.</li> <li>Communicate direction, tradeoffs, and timelines clearly to engineers, partner teams, and senior leadership, especially when the answer involves changing how people work today.</li> <li>Represent the platform's roadmap and constraints in planning conversations, and negotiate scope and sequencing honestly.</li> <li>Partner with security, IT, and governance functions on access management, data governance, and compliance requirements.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What You'll Bring:</strong></h2> <h3>REQUIRED</h3> <ul> <li>2+ years managing engineers, plus a strong prior track record as a hands-on data or infrastructure engineer. You should still be able to read a Terraform plan and a bad query execution plan.</li> <li>6+ years total experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or closely related infrastructure work.</li> <li>Demonstrated experience leading technical change through influence: bringing stakeholders along, sequencing migrations so no team gets stranded, and sustaining momentum on multi-quarter efforts.</li> <li>Hands-on depth with modern cloud data platforms. Direct experience with Databricks and/or Snowflake, and the judgment to evaluate platforms against each other on cost, capability, and operational fit rather than preference.</li> <li>Strong AWS experience. Experience o