Engineering Manager (Data and Platform Engineering)

About Caribou At Caribou, we care about giving people financial freedom so they can focus on what s most important to them. Today, less than two percent of Americans refinance their auto loans despite drastic increases in the cost of new and used cars. We see huge potential to help folks reduce their monthly auto expenses, as well as increase the predictability of those expenses over time. We do this by building technology to pair customers with community banks and credit unions, and ushering them through the process quickly. On average, our drivers save $159/month on their car loans while protecting their investment long term. Caribou is led by leaders from the technology, automotive, and finance industries. We re proud to be backed by a great team of investors, including QED Investors, Goldman Sachs, Moderne Ventures, Accomplice, Link Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and others. About the Role The Challenge Do you know what it takes to evolve "some dbt models" into a fully governed, well-tagged data platform that every function in the company trusts? Are you ready to take IaC from 60% to 100% coverage while building multi-region resiliency for sensitive financial data? The Team and Scope As our Data and Platform Engineering Manager, you'll lead a team of six engineers - three data and three platform - reporting directly to the CTO. You'll steward the full lifecycle from raw ingestion to governed data assets, while growing Caribou's GCP infrastructure toward complete automation and cost efficiency. This role sits at the heart of Caribou's engineering leadership team - a meaningful seat at the table as we scale toward our next stage. Our Stack and Philosophy We're on GCP (GKE, Cloud Storage, CloudSQL, BigQuery, Cloud Composer) and use dbt and Pulumi. We care more about your engineering fundamentals and curiosity than your specific history with these tools. If you're experienced in AWS, Snowflake, or Terraform and excited to apply those principles to our stack, we want to talk to you. Your First 90 Days Your primary mission will be to lead your data engineers, alongside our analytics and data science teams, in maturing our medallion and marts architecture. We aim to deliver material protection against data evolution for the organization by the second half of 2026. What You Will Do • Shape the architectural vision for our data platform, ensuring high-quality, self-service data assets across all business functions • Lead the SDLC for your team, delivering platform and infrastructure improvements consistently and with clear communication • Strengthen Caribou's GCP infrastructure by growing IaC coverage, optimizing cloud spend, and building platform resiliency • Collaborate with Analytics and Product to understand platform needs and translate that context into a prioritized roadmap • Mentor and coach engineers to deepen their expertise across data modeling, platform engineering, and technical leadership • Help shape Caribou's engineering culture, contributing a perspective that touches every part of the business This role is remote from a state where Caribou operates (see exclusions below), with a preference for the Chicago IL, Denver CO, or Phoenix AZ areas and the option to work from our Denver or Chandler offices. Please let us know if you need accommodations at any point during the interview process. What We Look For • Experience leading engineers who build and mature data platforms - from raw ingestion pipelines through governed assets business teams rely on • Fluency with the modern data stack: dbt, a cloud warehouse (BigQuery or equivalent), orchestration tooling, and sound data modeling patterns • Cloud infrastructure fluency - IaC tooling (Terraform or equivalent), cost discipline, and the operational rigor a regulated financial environment demands • Collaborative leaders who favor context over command and control, measuring success by the growth of those around them • Curious, life-long learners equally at home in a data modeling discussion and a deep infrastructure review, bringing the same rigor to both. We know strong candidates rarely check every box, and backgrounds in this space take many shapes - analytics engineers who grew into platform ownership, SREs who moved into data, DevOps practitioners who found their way to EM. If this role excites you, we'd love to hear from you. Interview Roadmap: • Recruiter phone interview (30 mins) • At-home coding assessment (60 mins) • Hiring Manager video interview (60 mins) • Final interview loop - (4) one-hour video interviews scheduled across 1-4 business days How we will take care of you Everyone at Caribou is a valued team member. Our compensation and benefits package includes: • Competitive compensation: $175k - $215k • Eligible for annual performance based bonus • Equity options • 401k savings program • Generous paid time off including: Flexible Time Off (FTO) for all employees and 100% paid parental leave for all pa...