Senior Manager, Engineering

Position Summary Acuity is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to join the Digital Center of Excellence (DCoE) in Cork and lead an engineering team responsible for building and operating the Azure and Databricks foundation used by data engineering, analytics, and AI teams. The role combines people leadership, technical direction, delivery accountability, and operational ownership. The successful candidate will build a high-performing team, develop engineering talent, establish clear delivery practices, and ensure the platform is secure, reliable, observable, scalable, and cost-conscious across development, test, and production environments. Key Responsibilities People Leadership & Team Development - Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers, creating clear expectations for performance, ownership, collaboration, and technical quality. - Conduct regular one-to-ones, provide timely feedback, support career development, and create individual growth plans aligned to business and engineering needs. - Build an inclusive, accountable team culture where people raise risks early, learn from incidents, share knowledge, and continuously improve. - Own workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, role clarity, succession planning, and capability development for the team. - Recognize strong performance, address performance concerns constructively, and support engineers in achieving their full potential. Engineering Leadership & Technical Direction - Set the engineering direction for Databricks and Azure Data Lake platform capabilities in partnership with architecture, security, data engineering, analytics, and AI teams. - Ensure the team establishes and follows supported engineering patterns for workspace configuration, compute, Unity Catalog, storage integration, environment management, and lakehouse workloads. - Maintain a strong technical understanding of the platform, challenge design decisions where appropriate, and help the team resolve complex engineering and operational issues. - Drive sound engineering practices across architecture, code quality, testing, documentation, security, maintainability, and technical debt management. - Balance near-term delivery commitments with longer-term platform sustainability, standardization, and simplification. Delivery & Stakeholder Management - Own delivery outcomes for the team, including planning, prioritization, execution, dependency management, risk management, and transparent status reporting. - Partner with product, program, architecture, and business stakeholders to translate priorities into clear engineering plans and achievable commitments. - Create clarity on scope, sequencing, ownership, and decision-making, and ensure blockers and delivery risks are escalated early. - Use engineering and delivery metrics to improve predictability, flow, quality, reliability, and team effectiveness. - Communicate technical trade-offs, delivery options, risks, and recommendations clearly to both technical and business audiences. Security, DevOps & Automation - Ensure secure identity, secrets, networking, role-based access, and platform governance patterns are implemented with security and architecture teams. - Drive infrastructure-as-code, repeatable environment configuration, and automation of platform provisioning and change management. - Ensure effective Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, quality gates, release controls, and secure software supply chain practices are in place. - Promote controlled, traceable, and low-risk changes across development, test, and production environments. Reliability & Operations - Own the operational readiness and supportability of the platform, including monitoring, logging, alerting, runbooks, capacity, recovery, and incident response. - Ensure observability covers jobs, pipelines, data freshness, runtime performance, platform health, usage, and cost. - Lead structured incident and problem management, ensuring root causes are understood and corrective actions are completed. - Drive performance tuning, cost optimization, upgrade planning, resilience, disaster recovery, and continuous operational improvement. - Establish clear service ownership and support expectations across engineering and stakeholder teams. Required Qualifications - 10+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud platform engineering, data platform engineering, DevOps, or related roles, including experience leading and developing engineers. - Demonstrated people management experience, including coaching, performance management, career development, hiring, and building high-performing teams. - Strong experience leading delivery across complex technical initiatives with multiple stakeholders, dependencies, and operational considerations. - Hands-on technical background with Databricks, Azure Data Lake, cloud platforms, data engineering, DevOps, or comparable enterprise technology environments. - Strong knowledge of engineering practices including Git, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, testing, observability, reliability, security, and cost management. - Ability to make pragmatic decisions, manage competing priorities, and communicate technical and delivery trade-offs clearly. - Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Qualifications - Experience managing platform, data, cloud, DevOps, or site reliability engineering teams in an enterprise environment. - Databricks, Microsoft Azure, engineering leadership, or DevOps certification. - Experience supporting supply chain, manufacturing, ERP, or operational analytics platforms. - Experience with infrastructure-as-code, private networking, enterprise identity, policy automation, disaster recovery, and cost governance. - Experience leading teams through growth, organizational change, platform modernization, or operating-model improvement. Tools & Technologies - Platform: Databricks, Azure Data Lake, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog - Automation: infrastructure-as-code, reusable templates, Azure DevOps CI/CD - Security: managed identities, service principals, secrets, networking, RBAC - Operations: monitoring, logging, alerting, recovery, capacity, performance and cost management - Leadership: delivery planning, engineering metrics, talent development, performance management, and stakeholder communication.