[Hiring] Manager, Data & AI Platform Engineering @Guild

Role Description

As the Data and AI Platform Engineering Manager, you will lead the teams building Guild's Data platform and Apollo, our AI platform powering agent-based workflows, ML infrastructure, and AI-native tooling across the company. This is a leadership-first role (70/30 coach/player) managing two small teams: Data Platform Engineering and AI Platform.

Your primary impact will come through the team you build and the systems you put in place to ship reliably, while partnering closely with product, data science, and platform engineering to align with Guild's FY27 strategic priority of becoming an AI-native company.

The Opportunity

• Build, develop, and retain a high-performing engineering team across two platform squads, owning hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Drive the transition from ad-hoc AI usage to platform-powered, governed AI workflows, championing Guild's AI-native engineering vision.
• Deliver a reliable, scalable, and secure data and AI platform that accelerates time-to-value for teams across Guild.

As Data and AI Platform Engineering Manager, you will:

• Manage, mentor, and grow engineers across the Data Platform and AI Platform teams by running effective rituals (sprint planning, retros, 1:1s) and fostering a culture of ownership, experimentation, and technical excellence.
• Own hiring end-to-end for both teams: define roles, run interviews, calibrate leveling, and close candidates to fill out a high-performing organization.
• Set and drive the technical roadmap for Apollo's platform layers (gateway, orchestration, eval, memory, and semantic) and the data platform that feeds into Apollo and Guild's broader product suite.
• Make architecture decisions on build-vs-buy, vendor selection, and platform design trade-offs to ensure platform reliability, scalability, and security as adoption grows.
• Partner with the Director of Data Engineering to align Apollo's direction with broader Foundations and company strategy.
• Contribute to data governance, privacy, and compliance standards for AI/ML systems while staying current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
• Build templatized solutions (Slackbots, MCP servers, agent templates) that accelerate time-to-value for other teams across Guild.
• Champion Guild's data strategy to the entire company, ensuring data is accessible, well-governed, and powering key decisions.

Qualifications

• A track record of building and leading high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. Ideally 8+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering management role.
• Deep familiarity with data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow, dbt, FiveTran, BI tools) and AI/ML platform architecture (model serving, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, API gateway patterns).
• Strong product sense with the ability to translate business needs into platform capabilities and prioritize ruthlessly.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/production operations (monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLO management).
• Exceptional communication skills, comfortable presenting to executives, aligning with cross-functional partners, and writing clear technical documents.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, or agent framework development.
• Experience building internal data platforms or platform-as-a-product teams.
• Background in education technology, HR tech, or marketplace businesses.
• Experience operating in a 0-to-1 environment where you built a function from scratch.

Benefits

• Access to low-cost, high-quality health care options through Collective Health and Kaiser (due to coverage limitations, Kaiser is currently only available in CA & CO).
• Access to a 401k to help save for the future.
• Vacation policy to rest and recharge.
• 8 days of fully-paid sick leave, to take the time to heal and or recover.
• Family-friendly benefits, including 12 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing parents and 18-20 weeks for birthing parents; 4-week ramp-up period for when employees return from a leave of 6 weeks or more; as well as employer-paid short-term and long-term disability, employer-sponsored life insurance, fertility and caregiving benefits.
• Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low-cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services.
• Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth.