Tech Lead Manager - Data

About Us

Saildrone builds autonomous systems that dominate the world’s oceans

With more than 2 million nautical miles sailed and 50,000 days at sea, Saildrone has earned the trust of governments worldwide. Our unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) deliver continuous, real-time intelligence in the toughest oceans on Earth—giving our partners faster awareness, stronger security, and a decisive edge at sea.

Our USVs are long-range, extreme-endurance platforms powered by advanced sensors and proprietary AI - they have been designed to operate where no crewed vessel can. They collect critical insights above and below the surface to support border security, law enforcement, naval operations, and undersea infrastructure protection.

Headquartered in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington, DC, and global deployment hubs, Saildrone operates missions worldwide. Join a fast-moving, mission-driven team at the intersection of AI, autonomy, and defense technology—where data turns into intelligence, and intelligence drives action.

The Role

We are seeking a data engineering technical leader to guide our data engineering team through execution of projects, which include building datasets of vessels at sea to catch drug smuggling, ocean floor data to map previously undiscovered underwater features, and 20Hz wind data from the middle of a hurricane. This data is transmitted over satellite in real-time, ingested into services and datastores that this team maintains, and served up to external customers, as well as our internal mission control team of maritime experts. Additionally, there is cross-functional collaboration with our machine learning team to train ML models and derive key insights from our giant dataset.

This role requires hands-on design & development, staying close to the codebase, and leading cross-functional projects. Additionally, you will provide people leadership over a team of 4 ICs to help the team grow and thrive in their careers.

This role is required to be onsite in Alameda, CA in the Bay Area 3 days per week - this is our hybrid model. This is not a remote position.

Responsibilities

• Work with your team, engineering leaders, and other technical/non-technical stakeholders to develop a highly reliable, low latency data pipeline, while ensuring dataset quality.

• Utilize your engineering management skills to execute along a roadmap defined by business objectives, clarifying requirements, and informed by rigorous engineering design.

• Work with our technical program management team to align work to schedules and ensure delivery.

• Communicate in a friendly, supportive manner with engineers or other stakeholders, ensuring alignment and advocating for effective solutions.

• Engage with cross-functional teams of product managers, technical program managers, technical leads, software engineers and infrastructure engineers.

• Mentor and facilitate career development for individual contributors.

• Drive and support a culture of rigorous design and test around software features.

Required Skills and Experience

• 8+ years of relevant data engineering software development

• 1+ years people management experience, including technical team leadership, scheduling, and resource planning

• Expertise in relational databases (Postgres, AWS Aurora, PostGIS)

• Working knowledge of data warehousing solutions (Athena/Presto, BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, or Vertica)

• Familiar with Argo, Dagster, Airflow, or Luigi workflow orchestration engines

• Able to provide clear priorities, and be hands on as needed to ensure successful delivery

• Knowledge of software processes to produce sustainable and maintainable code

• Good verbal and written communication skills

Desired Skills and Experience

• Experience working with time series, geospatial, geo-temporal, or map-tile data would be a huge bonus

• Experience with data from drones or robots, such as those from ROS-based systems, would also be very helpful

• Expertise in Python or NodeJS programming languages

• Familiar with Parquet or Protobuf data file formats

• Experience with streaming technologies such Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Flink

• Experience with serverless functions, such as AWS Lambda

• NoSQL experience - DynamoDB, Redis, Influx, Timescale

• Knowledge of visualization tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, Tableau, Streamlit

• Experience with developing and deploying distributed services with Docker

• Built data pipelines for Machine Learning applications

Physical Requirements

• Work is performed on a computer and requires ability to operate a keyboard and other peripheral devices.

Location: This position is in Alameda, CA. Our waterfront office offers beautiful views of San Francisco Bay in always-sunny Alameda.

All employees are required to provide proof of authorization to work in the U.S. within their first 3 days of work. Please note that the Company does not sponsor employees for work visas or permanent resident cards to work in the U.S. If you need sponsorship for a work visa or green card, you will not be qualified for employment with Saildrone.

Benefits:

• Paid time off, including vacation, bereavement, jury duty, sick time and parental leave
• Comprehensive and competitive medical, dental and vision plans, and HSA with employer matching.
• Company sponsored life insurance
• Stock Options
• Annual stipend for continued learning and development
• Quarterly company BBQs at our Alameda HQ (bring your friends and family!)
• Free Bay Area Public Transportation via AlamedaTMA with the BayPass Clipper Card

Catch up on the latest news about us:

The British Engineer Behind the US Navy’s High-tech Ocean Drones – The Times of London

Denmark to Field Unmanned Vessels for Monitoring Busy Shipping Routes – Defense News

Counter-drug Sea Drones Utilized by Navy as Trump Ramps Up Military Resources at the Border

Saildrone, Palantir Partner to Use AI to Streamline USV Manufacturing, Operations – Breaking Defense

An Underwater Mountain was Newly Discovered off California Coast – San Francisco Chronicle

USVs Could Deter IUU Fishing – USNI Proceedings

TIME 100 Most Influential Companies 2024: Saildrone

Saildrone Featured Videos Playlist

Individual compensation packages are based on geographic location, scope of the role, relevant experience, and the ability to deal with complexity and problem solve within our organization, among other factors.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Any unsolicited resumes/candidate profiles submitted through our website or to personal email accounts of employees of Saildrone are considered property of Saildrone and are not subject to payment of agency fees.

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