NextGear Capital is hiring a Manager, Data Engineering to lead the team responsible for the data pipelines, transformation platforms, and analytics infrastructure powering floor plan lending operations. As Cox Automotive evolves toward AI-assisted, spec-driven development practices, you will play a key role in guiding your team through this transformation — championing specification quality, enabling cross-team collaboration, and ensuring AI-generated code meets our engineering standards.
What You'll Do:
- Build and lead a high-performing, cross-functional data engineering team, mentoring engineers and establishing growth paths into AI-augmented engineering practices
- Oversee the full software development lifecycle for data pipelines, transformations, and analytics services running in Azure, AWS, and Snowflake
- Ensure delivery of secure, well-tested, scalable data systems aligned to NextGear's Domain Constitution and Target State Architecture
- Champion spec-driven development workflows — detailed Change Specs authored collaboratively before code generation, validation against architectural guardrails before merge
- Maintain and contribute to component constitutions and context packs that guide AI-assisted code generation in your team's repositories
- Partner with product managers, architects, and platform teams to deliver against NextGear's roadmap, and coordinate across the Release Train to keep team patterns aligned with shared SDD standards
- Drive experimentation with AI coding workflows and surface effective patterns and anti-patterns back to the broader engineering organization
Who You Are
Minimum
- Bachelor’s degree in a related discipline and 6 years’ experience in a related field. The right candidate could also have a different combination, such as a master's degree and 4 years’ experience; a Ph.D. and 1 year experience in a related field; or 18 years’ experience in a related field
- 1+ year of experience in management or lead role
- Hands-on experience with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) as a primary part of the development workflow
- Demonstrated experience with spec-driven or design-doc-gated development workflows (e.g., OpenSpec, BMAD, GitHub SpecKit, or equivalent RFC/ADR-driven practices applied at team scale)
- Experience reviewing AI-generated code and implementation plans for quality, security, and architectural compliance
- Experience with modern software engineering practice: CI/CD, code review discipline, test strategy, observability, incremental modernization
Preferred
- Hands-on experience in Azure cloud environments, including Azure Functions and Azure-based data platform services
- Experience with Microsoft Fabric for data pipelines and transformation, including Fabric-based ETL/FTP integration patterns
- Familiarity with AWS services commonly used for data workloads (AppFlow, S3, Lambda, Fargate, EC2)
- Direct data engineering experience: data modeling, SQL/SQL Server, dbt, data governance practices, Erwin or comparable modeling tools
- Experience with Snowflake and modern cloud data warehousing
- Experience with Power BI or comparable analytics platforms
- Experience in automotive finance, lending, or risk management domains
- Experience creating or governing component-level documentation artifacts (constitutions, context packs, architecture overviews, operational runbooks) that enable cross-team portability
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or comparable)
Drug Testing:
To be employed in this role, you'll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.
Compensation:
Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $111,500.00 - $185,900.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.
Benefits:
The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.
EOE, including disability/vets
