Software Engineering Manager, Data

at  DocuPet

ABOUT DOCUPET

As the official pet registration provider for more than 250 jurisdictions, DocuPet is the largest and fastest growing pet registration platform in North America.
Our proprietary platform consolidates all pet information into a single place and provides the services for pet owners, community members and animal shelters to ensure pets can be reunited quickly if they become lost.
Beyond our platform, DocuPet offers specialized pet tags, an AI-powered pet tracker, lost pet alert system, and will soon be launching a first-of-its-kind pet parenting mobile app - all aimed to ensure every pet in North America is registered and that each has a safe and happy home.
Our work is very important. More than 6 million pets enter animal shelters every year. Just 10% of those animals are returned to their owners. Effective registration, pet identification, reunification tools, and animal shelter resources, all provided by DocuPet, is the solution that will measurably reduce shelter intakes while providing significant new funding for animal welfare organizations.
A new National Pet Record Search Tool, available for free to all shelters joining our National Animal Shelter Network will be launched in Q2 of 2025. DocuPet has the support of the animal welfare industry, and with astute strategic leadership will become the de facto National Pet Registry program serving tens of millions of pet owners by 2027.

ABOUT THIS ROLE

DocuPet is looking for a technical, hands-on, and strategic Software Engineering Manager to lead our Data team. This team is responsible for building and maintaining the data services and functionalities that power our platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, and enabling data-driven, real-time decision making across the company.
You’ll manage a cross-functional team of DataOps Engineers, Data Software Engineers, and a Software Technical Lead (Operations). DataOps Engineers focus on data operations and automation, such as writing queries for BI reports, correcting production data, and optimizing operational workflows. They will also have opportunities to contribute to product-side software engineering efforts. Data Software Engineers focus on roadmapped product development, designing and implementing highly scalable data solutions. You’ll provide technical oversight, mentorship, and strategic direction, ensuring seamless collaboration across teams and alignment with business objectives.
This role requires strong technical leadership and skills, mentorship, and collaboration as you work closely with the Product, Platform, Licensing Data team, and other Business stakeholders. You’ll be responsible for guiding the team’s technical strategy alongside software architects, ensuring high-quality data engineering practices, and driving the long-term success of DocuPet’s data services and ecosystem. This position reports directly to the Director of Software Engineering.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• People & Team Leadership: Manage a high-performing, cross-functional team, including hiring a Technical Lead to oversee and lead the DataOps engineers, allowing you to focus on scaling the product-side of our data team. Manage a product-pod-sized group of up to 8 engineers, which includes a Software Technical Lead (Data Operations), Data Software Engineers and DataOps Engineers. Provide technical mentorship and leadership to all team members, fostering a culture of excellence and collaboration across disciplines. Oversee and perform HR-related activities such as time-off management, performance management, conflict resolution, onboarding, offboarding, and other people-focused responsibilities.
• Cultivate a Team: Recruit, build, mentor, coach and level up software engineers helping them develop into technical leaders with a sense of ownership, work ethic, and instilling best practices.
• Career Development: Drive career development and growth for team members through regular, ongoing career conversations, ensuring all direct reports have clear paths to progress and thrive. Set expectations, provide clear feedback, and identify coaching opportunities to help individuals achieve their goals. Curate and oversee transition plans for promotions, ensuring seamless role changes and readiness to take on new responsibilities. Actively work to remove blockers and foster a team culture where members feel supported and empowered to advance their careers.
• Data Pipelines: Design, build, and maintain software to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data at scale, ensuring accurate and timely ingestion across the platform. Analyze data quality and implement automated processes for validation, alerting, and anomaly detection.
• Data Warehouse & Data Lake: Develop and maintain a robust data warehouse and data lake ecosystem (e.g., using Redshift, Snowflake, Delta Lake, or S3-based architectures) to support advanced reporting, analytics, and scalable data processing.
• Operations: Take ownership of requests involving critical day-to-day data operations. This includes scripting and executing database queries to import, correct, or alter sensitive production data, creating reports using SQL queries in BI software (i.e., using Metabase) and building AWS Lambda functions to automate data TOIL tasks, and maintain regular data hygiene in production. Provide ongoing support for a legacy Python-based data import tool, with plans to rebuild and modernize over time. Ensure data operations are conducted with precision, security, and alignment to the needs of the business.
• Database Architecture & Scalability: Architect and optimize relational databases to ensure scalability, performance, and reliability as our platform grows. Collaborate closely with the Platform team and DBAs to align on database best practices, performance tuning, and capacity planning. Ensure that database design supports operational needs, data integrity, and long-term maintainability while leveraging expertise from the DBA to enhance monitoring, security, scalability, and optimization strategies.
• Data Governance: Establish and enforce data governance policies and processes to ensure the consistency, accuracy, security, and compliance of data across the organization. Collaborate closely with the Platform team (Information Security) to align with enterprise security policies, programs and processes, ensuring that data governance practices meet compliance and security standards. Work with business SMEs to navigate legal requirements around data ownership, data controllers, data access, and data usage, ensuring clear accountability and adherence to regulations. Lead efforts to create structured processes and workflows for identifying and addressing incorrect data while defining ownership and responsibility across teams.
• Collaboration: Work closely with the Platform team, which owns and maintains the underlying data infrastructure, including data pipelines, data warehouse, data observability, auditing, and logging. Ensure alignment on scalability, security, and reliability while focusing the Data Engineering team’s efforts on data modeling, transformation, governance, and analytics enablement. Partner with product managers, business stakeholders, particularly the Licensing Data team, and engineering teams to align data software solutions with company objectives, optimizing both operational workflows and long-term strategic goals.
• Tech Lead: Collaborate on and engineer requirements writing technical specifications and designs from product requirements documents. Act as product-facing business logic and technical SME for the various product pods under your leadership. Coordinate with software architects and technical leads to ensure requests, bugs, features, and enhancements’ technical requirements are well-documented and defined.
• Drive Culture: Collaborate with other Engineering Managers and partner with the Director of Engineering to improve the Engineering culture, organization, and to uphold our mission & values.