Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning

Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning

At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary. We’re a one-of-a-kind marketplace for buying and selling special objects. Each week, more than 100,000 unique items are auctioned, all carefully curated by our in-house experts. Having sold over 25 million unique objects, our mission is to become the world’s most popular destination for special objects. As a growing, diverse and sustainable scale-up, we proudly live by three core values: taking ownership and driving impact, being open to change and feedback, and being passionate about our mission and our customers.

Your mission As Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning, you’ll lead Catawiki’s established team of Data Engineers and Machine Learning specialists. You’ll help the team grow, set its technical direction and build on work already underway across data foundations and production machine learning. The role spans two connected disciplines. You’ll bring deep experience in either Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering, and enough breadth to set direction across the other. You’ll partner with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders to set priorities and connect the team’s work to outcomes across Catawiki.

What you'll do

• You’ll lead the team through platform modernisation and product-facing ML work. Current priorities include modernising the infrastructure for serving production models, introducing a feature store to improve feature management and consistency across model training and serving, and strengthening observability and cost controls. You’ll help set priorities and raise the reliability and impact of this work. You’ll lead and develop the team by setting direction, coaching experienced specialists and creating clear ownership across Data Engineering and Machine Learning. You’ll build dependable data foundations by improving the pipelines, integrations and infrastructure the wider Data team relies on for analysis, reporting and machine learning. You’ll strengthen production ML by improving deployment, monitoring and operational follow-through for production models, so teams can run them reliably and resolve issues effectively. You’ll advance marketplace models by helping teams improve recommendation, cancellation and bidder-risk use cases, connecting model performance to meaningful product outcomes. You’ll set direction and priorities by working with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business partners to choose high-value problems and balance delivery, reliability and long-term platform health. You’ll shape the technology strategy, reporting to the SVP Engineering, joining the Engineering Management team and helping to shape the direction of the Technology department.

• What you'll bring

• You combine strong technical judgment with experienced people leadership, creating clarity in a complex environment, empowering specialists and making sound decisions across both disciplines. Your experience will include familiarity with Catawiki’s current stack or equivalent experience with other platforms. You’ll have technical depth in one discipline—designing, building and operating data-intensive systems in Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering—with practical knowledge of the other. You’ll have people leadership experience coaching engineers or ML specialists, setting clear expectations. You’ll have architecture and systems thinking ability to evaluate trade-offs and guide architecture for data platforms, distributed systems and production infrastructure. You’ll have production ML understanding, including deployment, monitoring and operation of machine learning systems in production. You’ll have business and product judgment to connect technical work to business goals and assess outcomes. You’ll have relevant cloud platform experience; we run on GCP using BigQuery, Vertex AI and Kubernetes, with relevant AWS experience also being useful. You’ll have streaming and integration experience with Kafka or modern data integration tools. You’ll have clear communication skills to explain technical trade-offs and align technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• How we work

• You’ll lead a team of eight Data Engineers and Machine Learning specialists across Amsterdam and Lisbon. The team works closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business stakeholders to connect data and ML capabilities to real needs. Specialists own implementation while you set direction, priorities and clear standards. The team supports production data and ML systems and has no on-call rotation.

• Where you'll be

• This is a hybrid role in Amsterdam. You will work from our Amsterdam HQ a minimum of 2 days per week.

• Why You'll Love Working with Us

• Create a visible impact by working at scale in a global organisation serving millions of customers across 80+ categories. In our flat structure, every role has a broad scope and directly impacts both our customers and the business. Learn and grow through our Learning & Development initiatives, including clear development plans and mentorship programmes to support your career progression. A culture of connection defines us. We’re a passionate, diverse team of 800+ Catawikians representing 60+ nationalities. We foster an inclusive and queer-friendly environment where everyone is encouraged to bring their full self to work. Celebrate life’s moments with us. You’ll receive a Catavoucher when you join, a Catavoucher on your birthday, and an extra day off each year to pursue your passion. We also offer additional leave for key work anniversaries and important life events. Benefits may vary by location.

• Our Offices and Way of Working

• Our vibrant offices in Amsterdam and Lisbon are designed to inspire collaboration. Most Catawikians operate in a hybrid setup, combining office-based and remote work, with a minimum of two days per week in the office, unless a role is explicitly stated as fully remote or fully office-based.