Manager, Data Engineering and AI-Ready Data Enablement

About the role

American Century Investments® is a leading global asset manager with over 65 years of experience helping a broad base of clients achieve their financial goals. Our expertise spans global equities and fixed income, multi-asset strategies, ETFs, and private investments. Privately owned and independent, we focus solely on investment management. We direct 40% of our dividends every year—over $2 billion since 2000—to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, driving breakthrough work to defeat life-threatening diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

We are looking for a Manager, Data Engineering and AI-Ready Data Enablement to lead development and operations for one of our Enterprise Data Technology teams. You will provide technical guidance for data engineering, data platforms, and AI-ready data products enriched with semantics and business context, mentor and guide your team to empowered delivery and growth, and contribute to our ongoing evolution to a Data Driven Culture. You will work closely with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development and consumption of trusted, AI-ready data products. The focus is data engineering and data enablement, rather than machine learning model development or ML engineering. This role reports to Director - Data Technologies.

This hybrid position may be based out of our Kansas City, Missouri or Southlake (DFW), Texas office. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship; applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without visa sponsorship, now or in the future.

Responsibilities

• Remain close to the technology as a hands-on technical leader: provide engineering guidance, contribute to technical design and architecture decisions, review engineering approaches, and help solve complex data challenges while leading and developing the team.
• Build and maintain an enterprise data ecosystem including ingestion, storage, organization, and interface, with scalable data engineering pipelines and data platforms that support trusted, AI-ready data products.
• Analyze business and technical requirements for data systems and applications; scope, estimate, and schedule project work; coordinate the integration of IT policies, procedures, and development practices.
• Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimizing data delivery, re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability.
• Research emerging data engineering, data platform, and semantic technologies to continuously improve the development and enablement of AI-ready data products.
• Lead the development of AI-ready data products enriched with metadata, business definitions, relationships, and context; build reusable semantic models and contribute to an enterprise semantic layer that supports consistent interpretation across analytics and AI use cases.
• Partner with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development and consumption of AI-ready data products through reusable engineering patterns, semantic modeling guidance, tooling, and hands-on support, while maintaining data quality, governance, and secure access.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or related field of study, or equivalent relevant work experience.
• 7+ years of progressive hands-on engineering experience implementing data engineering solutions and data platforms (i.e., ETL, ELT, data lakes, and cloud data warehouses).
• 2+ years of experience leading engineers through people management, technical leadership, or a combination of both.
• Hands-on experience building AI-ready data products by combining data engineering with semantic modeling, metadata, and business context, including experience developing or implementing an enterprise semantic layer.
• Experience partnering with IT and business data teams to enable self-service development of data products through reusable patterns, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
• 5+ years of experience using SDLC and Agile methodologies.
• 1-3 years of experience with AWS data services such as S3, Glue, Redshift, and EMR.
• 3-5 years of demonstrated experience with data movement (EMR, Glue, etc.).
• 5+ years of validated experience in programming languages – Python, Java, Scala, C#.
• 1-3 years of DevOps experience with Git, build, artifact/package management, and deploy automation.
• Able to work in a multi-functional team environment including varied business units, vendors, countries, and cultures.
• Demonstrates the American Century Investments Winning Behaviors: Client Focused, Courageous and Accountable, Collaborative, Curious and Adaptable, Competitively Driven.

Qualifications

• Experience in SQL, relational databases, and data modeling.
• AWS Certification.
• Experience designing, deploying, and supporting production cloud services in the AWS ecosystem including EC2, EMR, Glue.
• Able to develop business, technical, and application architecture.
• Architecture experience with Event Driven Design, APIs, Micro services, stateless/chaos engineering.
• Experience with financial product datasets.
• Familiarity with data discovery, analytics, and BI tools such as Tableau.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package with bonus plan.
• Generous PTO and competitive benefits.
• 401k with 5% company match plus annual performance-based discretionary contribution.
• Tuition reimbursement, formal mentorship program, live and online learning.

Schedule

Hybrid work arrangement; employees are required to be in the office on a scheduled frequency. Adherence to this schedule is essential to fulfilling the expectations of the role. Position based in Kansas City, Missouri or Southlake (DFW), Texas.