About the role

The Netskope Data Security team provides unrivaled visibility and real-time protection, ensuring customer data is secured wherever it resides. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead the Data Lineage team—the architects of a high-performance platform that traces the movement and transformation of data across cloud applications, endpoints, and on-premises systems. This product is defined by high-throughput streaming, large-scale database optimization, and sophisticated graph traversal logic that converts raw event streams into coherent, explainable provenance chains.

This role requires an entrepreneurial leader with a passion for innovation and a commitment to nurturing both engineering talent and product vision. You will act as both a technical lead and a product owner, partnering across the organization to align engineering milestones with strategic business objectives. You will define the roadmap, translate complex challenges into executable plans, and mentor a high-performing team while setting the long-term architectural direction.

What you will be doing

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Collaborate with Product Managers to co-own the product vision and roadmap. Prioritize the backlog by balancing new feature development with performance improvements, scalability investments, and architectural health.
• Technical Stewardship: Set the architectural vision for a high-throughput, multi-tenant platform. Guide the team's approach to streaming ingestion, distributed database optimization (PostgreSQL), and complex graph traversal algorithms.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product Managers, SRE, and adjacent engineering teams to align on requirements and dependencies. Translate deep technical trade-offs into clear, decision-ready recommendations for leadership and stakeholders.
• Operational Excellence: Define and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs), lead incident response and root-cause analysis, and drive reliability improvements for a production-critical system.

Required skills & experience

• Engineering Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineering teams. Proven track record in hiring, performance management, and driving technical roadmaps.
• Product leadership: Track record of collaborating with product managers to define scope, prioritize backlogs, and ship customer-facing outcomes.
• Strategic communication: Ability to bridge engineering, product, and leadership audiences, translating complex technical trade-offs into decision-ready recommendations.
• Bias for action: Experience operating in ambiguous environments, shaping roadmaps when requirements are incomplete, and navigating evolving problem spaces.
• Distributed Systems: Demonstrated experience owning and scaling high-throughput, distributed streaming systems (e.g., Kafka) in production environments.
• System Architecture: Expertise in designing resilient, scalable architectures that mitigate common production failure modes. Proficient in implementing robust design patterns like backpressure and circuit breaking to ensure reliability, with the technical depth to influence critical design decisions.
• Database Architecture: Demonstrated experience guiding teams through database-heavy platform design. Expertise in evaluating PostgreSQL (or equivalent) trade-offs, ensuring sound decisions regarding data modeling, sharding, and performance optimization for large-scale datasets.
• Graph Modeling: Experience providing architectural oversight for complex, relationship-heavy data systems. Skilled in coaching teams on modeling trade-offs and graph traversal strategies aligned with product performance and scalability.
• Operational Excellence: Proven track record in fostering a culture of operational rigor. Experience defining reliability strategies and establishing meaningful SLOs.
• Bonus Points: Deep experience with the end-to-end data lineage lifecycle, including telemetry collection, event unification, schema standardization, cryptographic fingerprinting, heuristic-based correlation, and graph-based modeling.
• Education: BSCS or equivalent required; MSCS or equivalent strongly preferred.