Data Engineering Manager Jobs in Illinois

INTRODUCTION

SentiLink provides innovative identity and risk solutions, empowering institutions and individuals to transact with confidence. We’re building the future of identity verification in the United States replacing a clunky, ineffective, and expensive status quo with solutions that are 10x faster, smarter, and more accurate. We’ve seen tremendous traction and are growing extremely quickly. Our real-time APIs have helped verify hundreds of millions of identities, starting with financial services and rapidly expanding into new markets. SentiLink is backed by world-class investors including Craft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Max Levchin. We’ve earned recognition from TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, PYMNTS, American Banker, LendIt, and have been named to the Forbes Fintech 50. We have also been named a 2026 FICO Industry Vanguard Decision Award Winner. Last but not least, we’ve even made history - we were the first company to go live with the eCBSV and testified before the United States House of Representatives on the future of identity. SentiLink supports a variety of ways to work, ranging from fully remote to in-office. We operate as a digital-first company with strong collaboration across the U.S. and India. We maintain physical offices in Austin, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago in the U.S., and in Gurugram (Delhi) and Bengaluru in India. If you’re located near one of these offices, we would love for you to spend time in the office regularly. Some roles are hybrid or in-office by design. For example, our engineering team in India works primarily from our Gurugram office.

ROLE

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Data Platform team, responsible for building and scaling the data infrastructure that powers SentiLink’s products and decisioning systems. This team owns the pipelines, storage systems, and data services that enable all of our products, data analysis and business intelligence. These systems are foundational to how we detect fraud, power machine learning models, and deliver insights to customers. As the manager of this team, you will lead a group of engineers responsible for designing and operating scalable data systems—from ingestion and transformation to serving and analytics. You’ll partner closely with Data Science, Product, and Engineering teams to ensure data is reliable, accessible, and actionable across the company. This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, platform architecture, and people leadership. You’ll define technical direction, improve the reliability and scalability of our data systems, and help evolve our data platform to support the company’s next stage of growth. We’re looking for a manager who has strong data engineering fundamentals and enjoys engaging deeply with technical systems—guiding architecture, reviewing designs, and helping solve complex data challenges. This is a remote, US-based position.

TECHNOLOGIES:

Golang, Python, PostgreSQL (RDS), Redshift, EMR, Spark, Docker, OpenSearch, AWS technologies (Lambda, Cognito and other standard services)

Responsibilities

- Lead and grow a team of data engineers responsible for SentiLink’s data platform and infrastructure
- Define and drive the technical vision for data ingestion, processing, storage, and serving systems
- Design and evolve scalable data pipelines (batch and real-time) to support product and data science use cases
- Ensure high standards for data quality, reliability, and observability across all data systems
- Partner with Data Science to enable their pipelines and enable efficient access to high-quality data
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to power data-driven features and decisioning systems
- Work closely with Infrastructure to optimize performance, cost, and scalability of data systems
- Establish best practices for data governance, schema management, and pipeline reliability
- Support operational excellence, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response for data systems
- Hire, mentor, and develop engineers while maintaining a high hiring bar
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
- Contribute to architecture and technical problem-solving as needed

REQUIREMENTS

- 2-5+ years of engineering management experience leading data or platform teams
- Strong background as a senior or staff-level data engineer or backend engineer with data focus
- Experience building and scaling data platforms, including ETL/ELT pipelines and data infrastructure
- Proficiency in Python, Golang, or similar languages
- Deep understanding of distributed data systems, batch and streaming architectures
- Experience with cloud-based data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Strong knowledge of databases, data modeling, and query optimization (SQL, RDBMS, data warehouses)
- Track record of delivering reliable, scalable data systems in production environments
- Comfortable leading technical discussions and diving into system design details
- Experience operating in fast-paced, startup or growth-stage environments
- Experience with big data and streaming technologies (Spark, Kafka, Flink, etc.) preferred
- Familiarity with data lakes, warehouses (Redshift), and modern data architectures preferred
- Experience building data platforms that support ML or fraud/risk systems preferred
- Fintech or fraud domain experience preferred

COMPENSATION

$200,000/year - $240,000/year + equity + benefits

PERKS

- Employer paid group health insurance for you and your dependents
- 401(k) plan with employer match (or equivalent for non US-based roles)
- Flexible paid time off
- Regular company-wide in-person events
- Home office stipend, and more!

CORPORATE VALUES

- Follow Through
- Deep Understanding
- Whatever It Takes
- Do Something Smart