Manager, Data Platform - AI Engineering

About the role

At Scout Motors, we empower our talented, inclusive, and entrepreneurial teams to innovate. What makes a Scout employee? Someone who is a visionary and a leader, who seeks new paths and shares lessons learned. A knowledgeable doer who collaborates across the company to build better. A go-getter with unrivaled passion.

The Manager, Data and AI Engineering is a hands-on technical leader responsible for leading and developing a team of Data Engineers and AI Engineers while actively contributing to the design, development, and deployment of enterprise Data and AI solutions. This person will lead multiple agile teams and drive the development of modern data platforms, AI-enabled applications, intelligent agents, and Generative AI solutions while ensuring delivery excellence, scalability, security, governance, and operational support.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Data Engineers, AI Engineers, and technical consultants.
• Establish team goals, performance expectations, career development plans, and technical growth initiatives.
• Foster a high-performing engineering team environment focused on innovation, collaboration, quality, and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical guidance, coaching, and code reviews across Data Engineering and AI initiatives.
• Participate in recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning activities.
• Architect, design, develop, and support scalable data platforms utilizing Databricks and cloud-native technologies.
• Lead development of enterprise data pipelines and ETL/ELT processes supporting analytics, AI, and operational reporting.
• Drive data quality, governance, lineage, metadata management, and security practices.
• Lead the design and deployment of AI and Generative AI solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend opportunities for business adoption aligned with team and enterprise objectives.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architects to define platform standards and reference architectures.
• Ensure Data and AI solutions align with enterprise governance, cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance requirements.
• Drive platform scalability, reliability, resiliency, and operational readiness.

Location & Travel Expectations

This role may be based out of the Scout Motors corporate headquarters in Charlotte, NC. This role requires 4–5 days per week in the office, with regular in-person meetings and events. Applicants should expect that the role will require the ability to convene with Scout colleagues in person and travel to participate in events on behalf of the company from time to time.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or related field (or equivalent work experience).
• 7+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Software Engineering, AI Engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• 3+ years of experience leading technical teams and Agile delivery teams.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and developing enterprise data solutions.
• Strong experience leading Data Engineering and AI Engineering teams.
• Experience managing cross-functional technical teams through full software development lifecycles.

Qualifications

• Experience with AI tools and platforms such as Databricks Data/AI Platform, Open WebUI, n8n, Pinecone, LangChain, LangGraph.
• Experience with cloud platform technologies such as AWS or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD Pipelines, Monitoring and Observability Platforms (Datadog).
• Experience with Generative AI solution development, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Prompt Engineering, AI Agents and Agent Frameworks, Vector Databases (Pinecone), and Large Language Models (LLMs).

Benefits

• Competitive insurance including medical, dental, vision and income protection plans.
• 401(k) program with employer match and immediate vesting.
• Generous Paid Time Off including 20 days planned PTO (as accrued), 40 hours of unplanned PTO, and 14 company or floating holidays annually.
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave for biological and adoptive parents of all genders.
• Paid leave for circumstances related to bereavement, jury duty, voting time, or military leave.
• Corporate Vehicle Program with eligibility for 1 assigned vehicle and a mobility stipend.

Pay

This is a full-time, exempt position eligible to receive a base salary and to participate in an annual performance bonus program. Final salary offered will be determined based on factors including, but not limited to, the candidate’s skills and experience. The annual performance bonus program is preset and not candidate dependent.

Initial base salary range: $160,000.00 – $192,500.00