Engineering Manager (Data Foundations)

About Us

Permutive’s mission is to rebuild data in advertising to protect privacy. The open internet needs a sustainable foundation that funds the free & open online experiences we all rely on. Permutive’s data collaboration platform uses edge technology to securely process data where it is and AI to discover signals that drive performance, respecting consumers’ privacy preferences while delivering outcomes for publishers & advertisers.

Our customers include some of the world’s largest media companies and advertisers, including News Corp, Warner Brothers Discovery, Hearst, The Guardian, Sky, State Street, Sonos, and Apple, and we’re backed by leading investors like SoftBank Vision Fund and Y Combinator.

About The Team

Data Foundation owns the data platform the rest of Permutive is built on. We process around 75,000 events per second on average, with peaks approaching 200,000, and turn that firehose into the catalog of event data, identities, and third-party marketplace data that every other team draws on. Ingestion, storage, identity resolution, routing, and external data onboarding are all ours.

Doing this well is a genuine engineering challenge. Most of our processing is live and stream-based rather than overnight batch, so maintaining consistency in near real time is a constant problem to solve. And at this volume, cost is an engineering concern in its own right, it's easy to make it explode, and keeping it under control takes real care.

The team is platform heavy but maintains product surfaces: external data onboarding has a customer facing experience, and the team owns the APIs and controls through which customers and internal teams manage data flows.

About The Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager who combines solid engineering foundations with the ability to build, support, and grow a high-performing team. You'll partner closely with a strong Tech Lead and work alongside other Engineering Managers and Product to shape how the wider platform evolves. Your engineering background matters, you'll engage in architectural trade-offs and help your team navigate complex distributed systems problems, but your primary impact will be through the people you lead and the clarity you bring to their work.

What you'll be doing?

• Owning the team's roadmap. Product, your Tech Lead, and the other Engineering Managers will all have a view on what to build and you'll weigh it, but the roadmap is yours to shape and yours to answer for. This is a role with genuine autonomy, you decide where the team invests and you own the outcome.

• Shaping the technical direction. You won't be writing production code, but you'll be in the architecture conversation, pushing on trade-offs, asking the sharp questions, and making sure the team is solving the right problem the right way. On a platform this technical, that judgement matters.

• Building the team. You'll be responsible for the growth, performance, and day-to-day support of your engineers and for how the team works together. We care about culture, collaboration, and how we improve over time, and you'll have real ownership over building the kind of team people are proud to be part of.

• Underpinning everything. Data Foundation's systems are consumed by every other team, what you build shows up across the whole platform. That reach is the leverage of the role: get the foundations right, and you make everyone faster.

You'll be doing all of this in a genuinely collaborative environment. We've worked hard to build a team with real psychological safety — where people can speak up, disagree well, and where good ideas win regardless of who they come from. It's a good place to work, and keeping it that way matters to us.

What you'll need?

• Experience managing a team of engineers (3+ engineers) in a delivery-focused environment.

  • You need to have actually managed people — supported their growth, had difficult conversations, and taken ownership of team outcomes.

• A strong engineering background in distributed systems, data platforms, or similarly complex domains.

  • We're not looking for someone who can pair-program with the team tomorrow, but we do need the technical depth to lead this team credibly — to make sound judgements at the architecture level — even if you're no longer hands-on day to day.

• The ability to work alongside strong technical ICs as a genuine partner; engaging with their thinking, helping them do their best work, and communicating clearly across technical and non-technical audiences.

We'd be particularly excited if you have

• Experience with data platform systems — ingestion pipelines, ETL orchestration, streaming or batch processing at scale.

• Familiarity with Scala, the JVM, or functional programming.

• Experience operating in a domain with strong privacy or compliance constraints — ad tech, health tech, fintech, or similar.

• Experience with identity resolution, data onboarding, or third-party data integrations.

• None of these are requirements. If you don't have much from this list, that's genuinely fine — if the role and the team sound like a fit, we'd encourage you to apply.

What we’re offering

We take a structured, objective approach to salary-setting, which is based on market information, our compensation strategy, and your experience and capability as assessed through our interview process. For a typical candidate who meets our requirements, we would pay between £110,000 - £130,000 + options.

Permutive Benefits

• In this together: As a full-time employee, you'll become a shareholder with stock options, sharing in our collective success.

• Family Comes First: Primary caregivers receive up to 6 months of fully paid leave and secondary caregivers receive 3 months of fully paid leave to bond with their little ones.

• Your Time, Your Way: Flexible hours let you fit work around your life, whether it's hitting the gym, meditating, or handling family needs.

• Upgraded Workspace: A £350 budget helps you create the perfect home office setup.

• Recharge & Refocus: Unlimited paid time off (with a minimum of 25 days + public holidays) ensures you get the rest you need.

• Grow with Us: Ongoing training and development opportunities fuel your career aspirations.

• Mental Health Matters: We prioritise your well-being with free access to Spill, our mental health partner.

• Comprehensive Care: Enjoy virtual GP visits, healthcare services, work-life consultations.

• Secure your future: Our pension plan with Penfold helps you secure your financial future (employer contributes 3%, employee contributes 5%).

• A company-paid Cursor Pro subscription for all engineers.

Work Your Way

Permutive trusts you to manage your time and deliver results. Our hybrid model allows you to choose where you work best, whether in your own productive space or our London (Farringdon) or New York (Union Square) offices. That said, none of us work alone; we are part of a team. 

To foster collaboration and connection, teams in these locations come together in person at least once a week and are encouraged to benefit from being in our offices to meet with teams more often. Commercial and customer-facing teams are encouraged to embrace in-person interactions to build lasting relationships with clients and colleagues. 

Every Permutive employee gets together in person at the company’s Annual Kick Off for a week in February.  Each year’s event promises to be an exciting opportunity for us to come together, reconnect with colleagues, and align on our shared vision for the year ahead.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Permutive, we’re taking a thoughtful, intersectional, long-term approach to diversity, equity & inclusion. We care deeply about creating an inclusive work environment that allows everyone to flourish, and we are taking continual action to progress in that direction.

We’re committed to hiring people regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, neurodiversity status, disability status, or otherwise.