Engineering Manager, Data Streaming

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew. We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization. To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success. Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture. If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you. WHAT YOU’LL DO The Platform Engineering Manager leads the Data Streaming team, a specialized group of platform and reliability engineers responsible for building and operating Braze’s managed data streaming platform. Powered by Kafka, Kafka Streams, and Apache Flink, the platform aims to make data streaming a solved problem, allowing internal product teams to ship streaming features without managing the underlying infrastructure. This role combines technical leadership, engineering management, and product ownership to deliver reliable, low-friction platform services that minimize cognitive load for internal consumers. Treating the platform as a product, the manager owns the long-term vision, gathers requirements from internal engineering teams, and drives adoption through clean, "paved-road" interfaces. Success is measured by how seamlessly consuming teams can deploy features rather than simple feature counts. Additionally, the manager partners closely with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to embed reliability practices into the stack, establish clear SLIs/SLOs, and ensure production and retrieval paths remain healthy as the platform scales globally. Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of streaming platform and reliability engineers while fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture. Treat the streaming platform as a product by defining capabilities based on consumer needs, and driving adoption via self-service, "paved-road" interfaces. Engage internal engineering consumers to gather requirements, prioritize initiatives by business impact, and align roadmaps with the broader Data Platforms vision. Provide technical guidance on architecture, scalability, and system design across the Kafka stack, connector frameworks, and stream-processing engines. Champion automation, observability, infrastructure-as-code, secure design, and strict data governance (schemas, retention, and SLAs). Partner with SRE leadership to align platform reliability with SLOs, collaborate on proactive monitoring, and foster operational excellence. Implement automated policies, guidance, and defaults to eliminate manual, per-team operational labor. Lead incident response and post-mortems, feeding key operational learnings back into hardening the platform. Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and healthy data paths as the streaming infrastructure scales globally. Who you Are 5 + years of increasing responsibility in platform engineering or infrastructure, including experience managing and mentoring engineering teams. A strong track record of owning and delivering infrastructure services that drive significant business value. Strong working knowledge of distributed, event-driven systems like Kafka (Connect/Streams) and Apache Flink to effectively guide architectural and reliability trade-offs. Hands-on experience building and scaling internal platforms using cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), infra