Manager, Data & AI Platform Engineering

At Guild, we believe talent is everywhere and that opportunity should be too. We continue to have our home and headquarters in Denver, but we have embraced a distributed model of working to reach the best talent in the United States. While some roles may require proximity to our Denver office, roles based outside of our Denver office can sit in any of the following 32 states: AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI and Washington D.C. Please only apply if you are able to live and work full-time in one of the states listed above. State locations and specifics are subject to change as our hiring requirements shift. 

If you are an Internal Candidate, please apply via our Internal Job Board. 

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To thrive as a company and meet our impact goals, we must cultivate a culture of high-performance. We know managers are often the single-largest driver of employee satisfaction and growth, and our talent is our biggest asset. Because of that, we’ve identified consistent expectations for all of Guild’s people managers — helping you know what to expect from your experience here.

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Remote or Denver, CO

As the Data and AI Platform Engineering Manager, you will lead the teams building Guild's Data platform and Apollo, our AI platform powering agent-based workflows, ML infrastructure, and AI-native tooling across the company. This is a leadership-first role (70/30 coach/player) managing two small teams: Data Platform Engineering and AI Platform. Your primary impact will come through the team you build and the systems you put in place to ship reliably, while partnering closely with product, data science, and platform engineering to align with Guild's FY27 strategic priority of becoming an AI-native company.

• Build, develop, and retain a high-performing engineering team across two platform squads, owning hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development
• Drive the transition from ad-hoc AI usage to platform-powered, governed AI workflows, championing Guild's AI-native engineering vision
• Deliver a reliable, scalable, and secure data and AI platform that accelerates time-to-value for teams across Guild

• Manage, mentor, and grow engineers across the Data Platform and AI Platform teams by running effective rituals (sprint planning, retros, 1:1s) and fostering a culture of ownership, experimentation, and technical excellence
• Own hiring end-to-end for both teams: define roles, run interviews, calibrate leveling, and close candidates to fill out a high-performing organization
• Set and drive the technical roadmap for Apollo's platform layers (gateway, orchestration, eval, memory, and semantic) and the data platform that feeds into Apollo and Guild's broader product suite
• Make architecture decisions on build-vs-buy, vendor selection, and platform design trade-offs to ensure platform reliability, scalability, and security as adoption grows
• Partner with the Director of Data Engineering to align Apollo's direction with broader Foundations and company strategy
• Contribute to data governance, privacy, and compliance standards for AI/ML systems while staying current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape
• Build templatized solutions (Slackbots, MCP servers, agent templates) that accelerate time-to-value for other teams across Guild
• Champion Guild's data strategy to the entire company, ensuring data is accessible, well-governed, and powering key decisions

• A track record of building and leading high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development. Ideally 8+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, ML/AI infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 3 years in an engineering management role.
• Deep familiarity with data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Airflow, dbt, FiveTran, BI tools) and AI/ML platform architecture (model serving, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, API gateway patterns)
• Strong product sense with the ability to translate business needs into platform capabilities and prioritize ruthlessly
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/production operations (monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLO management)
• Exceptional communication skills, comfortable presenting to executives, aligning with cross-functional partners, and writing clear technical documents

• Hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, or agent framework development
• Experience building internal data platforms or platform-as-a-product teams
• Background in education technology, HR tech, or marketplace businesses
• Experience operating in a 0-to-1 environment where you built a function from scratch

We are committed to equal pay for equal work and believe in compensation transparency. All salary ranges are standardized nationwide and will not vary by region. This role offers a competitive total compensation package, including a base salary of $200 - 240,000 and stock options. Compensation offered will be based on a combination of factors such as experience, competencies, and internal equity.

Posting Date: 3/19/2026

This role will be open for a minimum of 3 days.