About Skillz:

Skillz is driving the future of entertainment by accelerating the convergence of sports, video games and media for an exploding mobile-first audience worldwide. The company’s platform empowers mobile game developers and players with democratized access to fun, fair and skill-based competition for real prizes, shifting the paradigm to make eSports accessible to anyone, anywhere with a mobile device.

Skillz helps developers build multi-million dollar game franchises by turning content into competitive social gaming properties for the world’s 2.6 billion gamers. The company has already worked with 13,000 game developers, leveraging its patented technology to host over 800 million tournaments for 18 million players worldwide.

This year, Skillz was recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and CNBC Disruptor 50(for the second time). In 2018, Skillz was listed as one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups and Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Brilliant Companies. In 2017, Inc. Magazine ranked Skillz the No. 1 fastest-growing private company in America.

The company is backed by leading venture capitalists, media companies, and professional sports luminaries, ranging from Liberty Global, Accomplice, Wildcat Capital, Telstra Ventures, and a founder of Great Hill Partnersto the owners of the New England Patriots, Milwaukee Bucks, New York Mets, and Sacramento Kings.

Who we’re looking for:

As part of the product development organization, the Data Engineering team is managing and optimizing core Skillz’s data infrastructure, building and maintaining custom ingestion pipelines, integrating and providing data driven services and scaling to support various business functions and their machine learning models. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to grow and lead the Data Engineering team.

In this role you will lead engineering delivery as you partner closely with our Data Scientist and Data Analysts teams to serve various internal and external stakeholders. We are looking for a strong candidate that has outstanding communication skills, has proven data infrastructure design and implementation capabilities, and is focused on delivering objective results. He/she will be a self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity and will enjoy working in a fast-paced dynamic environment.

What You’ll Do:

Recruit, hire and motivate a world class team of engineers.
Help set the strategy and direction of Skillz data platform.
Lead and Mentor a team of engineers.
Partner with product owners and program managers to help plan releases and schedule development. Provide feedback and feasibility insights for proposed development features.
Define and deliver against department OKRs and KPIs
Embrace and embody Skillz core values in your work and interactions with peers, stakeholders and direct reports.
Maintain and promote an inclusive, and high-performance culture, provide support for your team’s career growth and personal development.
Leading a team to scale out data pipelines on top of streaming platforms.
Leading a team to build enterprise data infrastructure to support both business analytical needs and ML pipelines

Your Skillz:

Basic Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in engineering field or experience equivalent
6+ years of professional experience in software delivery
2+ years management experience leading a team of individual contributors
Proven track record of being results oriented with demonstrated ability to achieve aggressive goals.
Experience with agile software development methodologies
Experience delivering and managing multiple projects through their entire lifecycle
Working knowledge in one or more of the following: Python, Java, or Scala
AWS or other cloud data products (Data pipelines, Athena, Pinpoint, S3, etc)
Experience deploying data infrastructure
Experience with recognized industry patterns, methodologies, and techniques
Must have knowledge and/or experience with open source technologies and impact of build/buy decisions.
Able to anticipate business problems and influence solutions through functional and non-functional requirements.
Thrive in a highly collaborative and fast paced environment
Servant leader passionate about building and empowering teams

Bonus:

Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate complex technology solutions to senior leadership, gain alignment, and drive progress
2+ years experience on Kubernete, Helm chart
4+ years of experience with Spark, Scala and/or Akka
4+ years of experience with Spark Streaming, Storm, Flink, or other Stream Processing technologies
2+ years of experience working with Kafka or similar data pipeline backbone
4+ years of experience with Unix/Linux systems with scripting experience in Shell, Perl or Python
2+ years’ experience with Airflow, Data Lake, Terraform, and functional paradigm
Familiarity with Snowflake or OLAP
Familiarity with Kinesis, Lamda
Prior experience in gaming
Prior experience in finance

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.