Senior Data Engineer

About Manifest Global

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility -connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $80M raised. Still early.

About This Role

Manifest Global operates four brands across 50+ countries, generating data across thousands of schools, hundreds of thousands of students, and 1,000+ university partners. Counselor behaviour, student application journeys, university conversion rates, placement outcomes, attribution revenue - it's all there. The data exists. The question is whether the infrastructure around it is good enough to make it useful.

Right now, the data platform works. Pipelines run, the warehouse holds data, the BI layer surfaces reports. But Manifest is growing - new brands, new markets, new activation use cases - and the infrastructure needs to scale with it. There are pipelines that need to be more reliable. Transformation logic that needs to be cleaner. Warehouse design that needs to handle more volume without degrading performance. And an activation layer - reverse ETL, operational analytics, data flowing into the tools the business actually uses - that is still being built.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will own significant parts of the data platform end to end - ingestion, transformation, warehouse, activation - and you will be one of the people who determines whether Manifest's data infrastructure is a genuine competitive advantage or a persistent constraint. You will work closely with Principal Engineers, Product, and business stakeholders across all four brands, and you will be expected to operate with the ownership and judgment of someone who has built production-grade data systems before.

What makes this role different: Manifest has real data - cross-brand, multi-geography, commercially significant data. The stack is modern: Snowflake, dbt, Hevo, Airtable, Metabase. The problems are real. And when the data infrastructure surfaces the right insight, it changes a decision that affects real students and real institutions.

AI is central to how we build: This isn't just a data engineering role - it is a role where you will actively design and build AI infrastructure that accelerates the team's own development velocity. We use Snowflake Cortex AI with Claude in our daily engineering workflow - for debugging, RCA, query optimisation, and pipeline analysis. We have already cut root cause analysis time. The next step is embedding AI deeper: automated ticket handling, intelligent monitoring, and AI-assisted development tooling that lets the team move faster without sacrificing reliability.

What You Will Own

1. AI Infrastructure for Data Engineering

• Design and build AI-assisted development tooling - LLM-powered code generation for dbt models, SQL transformations, and pipeline scaffolding that dramatically reduces time-to-production for new data assets
• Build intelligent data quality and anomaly detection systems - AI-driven monitoring that learns normal patterns across pipelines and surfaces anomalies before they propagate downstream, replacing manual threshold-based alerting
• Implement AI-augmented data cataloguing and lineage - automated documentation generation, schema understanding, and semantic tagging so engineers spend less time writing docs and more time building
• Develop AI-powered pipeline debugging and root cause analysis - tooling that diagnoses failures, traces impact through the DAG, and proposes fixes rather than requiring engineers to trace failures manually
• Build and maintain the infrastructure that supports AI features - vector stores, embedding pipelines, retrieval layers, and model serving infrastructure that powers AI capabilities across Cialfo, BridgeU, and Explore
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI developer tools - stay ahead of how AI tooling (Claude, Cortex AI, GitHub Copilot, LLM APIs) can be embedded into the team's workflow to shorten feedback loops and accelerate feature delivery

2. Data Warehouse Design, Cost & Maintenance

• Own significant portions of the Snowflake data warehouse - schema design, performance optimisation, and the integrity of the data models that the rest of the stack depends on
• Apply strong data warehousing methodologies: dimensional modelling, layered transformation logic, clear separation between raw, staged, and served layers
• Design and build cross-brand data primitives - shared, canonical data layers for K12, Student, University, and Application data that work consistently across Cialfo, BridgeU, and Kaaiser. This is active work and a critical foundation for the multi-brand data platform
• Own Snowflake cost optimisation - monitor warehouse spend, identify high-cost queries and sync jobs, right-size warehouse configurations, and drive measurable reductions in monthly compute spend.
• Ensure the warehouse handles increasing data volumes from across all four brands without degrading query performance or downstream reliability

3. ETL/ELT Pipelines, Scheduling & Transformation Logic

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade data pipelines - ingestion via Hevo or similar, transformation via dbt, SQL-based logic th