Engineering Manager, Data Activation

About the role

Mixpanel Engineering is a small, fast-moving team focused on delivering real value to customers. We build powerful AI-powered product analytics while obsessing over clarity, simplicity, and delight. Engineers here own problems end to end. You can move across the stack to ship impact without being blocked by silos or heavy process. Product innovation drives our business, and product engineering teams own that responsibility. The Infrastructure group focuses on high-scale customer data, operating as a force multiplier for the broader company as it moves toward an AI-first product. It comprises of four teams, Data Foundation, Query Engine, Data Storage and Data Activation. The Data Activation team owns how data moves out of Mixpanel and into the rest of a customer's stack. We build Cohort Syncs to marketing and ad platforms, Data Pipelines to warehouses, and Real-Time Event Streaming that lets customers act on behavioral signals the moment they happen. Our mission is to help customers turn insights into action, the behavioral data in Mixpanel is only as valuable as what teams can do with it, and we make it power personalization, lifecycle marketing, ad targeting, and increasingly, AI agents. In doing so, we're transforming Mixpanel from an analytics tool into critical data infrastructure that customers' products, campaigns, and workflows depend on every day. Together, these teams are driving foundational initiatives like elastic query compute, distributed file caching, real-time data streaming, and AI-ready APIs that will underpin the next generation of the product. Collectively, they combine deep expertise in high-scale distributed systems and backend engineering to ensure Mixpanel's infrastructure is reliable, performant, and a core part of the broader data ecosystem ready for the demands of an AI-driven future. We are looking for an Engineering Manager. Teams operate as autonomous pods, with engineering, product, and design working side by side on clear strategic goals. Teams have direct access to customer feedback, product usage data, business metrics, and design context. We start with customer problems. We reason from first principles. We challenge assumptions. We aim for simple solutions to complex problems and avoid unnecessary abstraction. Engineering owns execution, quality, and operations. There are no project managers, QA teams, or separate SREs. Ownership stays with the people building the product. We value written thinking, dashboards, and demos over slide decks. We work openly using tools like Slack, GitHub, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma, and Zoom. Our team is distributed across North America, with strong clusters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin.

Responsibilities

• Lead and build AI-first product experiences from inception to global scale.
• Lead an engineering team and grow its scope over time. This role is for someone who loves developing people and unlocking their potential.
• Build an exceptional team by hiring well, coaching deeply, and creating a culture where engineers feel ownership and pride in what they ship.
• Shape direction alongside Product, turning big ideas into focused execution and helping teams move fast without losing quality.
• Set the technical bar and protect the system. Depending on level, this may mean hands-on technical leadership or empowering tech leads with clarity and trust.

Requirements

• 10+ years engineering experience; 4+ years leading engineering teams
• Experience building and running infrastructure supporting real-world, customer-facing web applications.
• Experience building and using AI-powered products in production environments.
• Proven collaboration with product managers and designers on meaningful infrastructure.
• Strong judgment in technical tradeoffs, backed by lessons learned.
• Evidence of leadership through influence, alignment, and growing others.
• Director candidates must have experience managing managers.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, making tradeoffs, and bringing clarity to complex org structures
• High level of ownership, accountability, and product intuition
• Additional Resources
• Engineering Life Page
• Engineering Blog

Benefits

Additional Information

About Mixpanel Mixpanel turns data clarity into innovation. Trusted by more than 29,000 companies, including Workday, Pinterest, LG, and Rakuten Viber, Mixpanel's AI-first digital analytics help teams accelerate adoption, improve retention, and ship with confidence. Powering this is an industry-leading platform that combines product and web analytics, session replay, experimentation, feature flags, and metric trees. Mixpanel delivers insights that customers trust. Visit mixpanel.com to learn more.

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