Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning

Your mission

As Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning, you’ll lead Catawiki’s established team of Data Engineers and Machine Learning specialists. You’ll help the team grow, set its technical direction and build on work already underway across data foundations and production machine learning.

The role spans two connected disciplines. You’ll bring deep experience in either Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering, and enough breadth to set direction across the other.

You’ll partner with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders to set priorities and connect the team’s work to outcomes across Catawiki.

What you'll do

You’ll lead the team through platform modernisation and product-facing ML work. Current priorities include modernising the infrastructure for serving production models, introducing a feature store to improve feature management and consistency across model training and serving, and strengthening observability and cost controls. You’ll help set priorities and raise the reliability and impact of this work.

• Lead and develop the team: Set direction, coach experienced specialists and create clear ownership across Data Engineering and Machine Learning.
• Build dependable data foundations: Improve the pipelines, integrations and infrastructure the wider Data team relies on for analysis, reporting and machine learning.
• Strengthen production ML: Improve deployment, monitoring and operational follow-through for production models, so teams can run them reliably and resolve issues effectively.
• Advance marketplace models: Help teams improve recommendation, cancellation and bidder-risk use cases, connecting model performance to meaningful product outcomes.
• Set direction and priorities: Work with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business partners to choose high-value problems and balance delivery, reliability and long-term platform health.
• Shape the technology strategy: Reporting to the SVP Engineering, you’ll join the Engineering Management team and help shape the direction of the Technology department.

What you'll bring

You combine strong technical judgement with experienced people leadership. You create clarity in a complex environment, empower specialists and make sound decisions across both disciplines.

Your experience will include the following. Familiarity with Catawiki’s current stack is useful, and equivalent experience with other platforms is welcome.

• Technical depth in one discipline: Deep experience designing, building and operating data-intensive systems in Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering, with practical knowledge of the other.
• People leadership: Experience leading experienced engineers or ML specialists, coaching their growth and setting clear expectations.
• Architecture and systems thinking: Ability to evaluate trade-offs and guide architecture for data platforms, distributed systems and production infrastructure.
• Production ML understanding: Experience with the deployment, monitoring and operation of machine learning systems in production.
• Business and product judgement: Ability to connect technical work to business goals, make priority calls and assess outcomes.
• Relevant cloud platform experience: We run on GCP using BigQuery, Vertex AI and Kubernetes. Experience with equivalent AWS services is also relevant.
• Streaming and integration experience: Kafka, event-driven systems or modern data integration tools are useful.
• Clear communication: Ability to explain technical trade-offs and align technical and non-technical stakeholders.

How we work

• You’ll lead a team of eight Data Engineers and Machine Learning specialists across Amsterdam and Lisbon.
• The team works closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders to connect data and ML capabilities to real needs.
• Specialists own implementation while you set direction, priorities and clear standards.
• The team supports production data and ML systems, and has no on-call rotation.

Where you'll be

This is a hybrid role in Amsterdam. You will work from our Amsterdam HQ a minimum of 2 days per week.