Engineering Manager, Data Activation

About Mixpanel

Mixpanel’s AI-first digital analytics help teams accelerate adoption, improve retention, and ship with confidence. Its platform combines product and web analytics, session replay, experimentation, feature flags, and metric trees to deliver insights customers trust.

About the Team

Mixpanel Engineering is a small, fast-moving team focused on delivering real value to customers. Engineers own problems end to end and can move across the stack to ship impact without being blocked by silos or heavy process. Product innovation drives the business, and product engineering teams own that responsibility.

The Infrastructure group focuses on high-scale customer data, operating as a force multiplier for the broader company as it moves toward an AI-first product. It comprises four teams: Data Foundation, Query Engine, Data Storage, and Data Activation.

The Data Activation team owns how data moves out of Mixpanel and into the rest of a customer's stack. The team builds Cohort Syncs to marketing and ad platforms, Data Pipelines to warehouses, and Real-Time Event Streaming that lets customers act on behavioral signals the moment they happen. Its mission is to help customers turn insights into action. By doing so, the team is transforming Mixpanel from an analytics tool into critical data infrastructure that customers' products, campaigns, and workflows depend on every day.

Together, these teams are driving foundational initiatives like elastic query compute, distributed file caching, real-time data streaming, and AI-ready APIs that will underpin the next generation of the product. Collectively, they combine deep expertise in high-scale distributed systems and backend engineering to ensure Mixpanel's infrastructure is reliable, performant, and a core part of the broader data ecosystem ready for the demands of an AI-driven future.

About the Role

Mixpanel is looking for an Engineering Manager for the Data Activation team.

• Teams operate as autonomous pods, with engineering, product, and design working side by side on clear strategic goals.
• Teams have direct access to customer feedback, product usage data, business metrics, and design context.
• The organization starts with customer problems, reasons from first principles, challenges assumptions, and aims for simple solutions to complex problems while avoiding unnecessary abstraction.
• Engineering owns execution, quality, and operations. There are no project managers, QA teams, or separate SREs.
• The team values written thinking, dashboards, and demos over slide decks and works openly using tools like Slack, GitHub, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma, and Zoom.
• Our team is distributed across North America, with strong clusters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin.

Responsibilities

• Lead and build AI-first product experiences from inception to global scale.
• Lead an engineering team and grow its scope over time.
• Develop people and unlock their potential.
• Build an exceptional team by hiring well, coaching deeply, and creating a culture where engineers feel ownership and pride in what they ship.
• Shape direction alongside Product, turning big ideas into focused execution and helping teams move fast without losing quality.
• Set the technical bar and protect the system. Depending on level, this may mean hands-on technical leadership or empowering tech leads with clarity and trust.

Requirements

• 10+ years engineering experience; 4+ years leading engineering teams
• Experience building and running infrastructure supporting real-world, customer-facing web applications.
• Experience building and using AI-powered products in production environments.
• Proven collaboration with product managers and designers on meaningful infrastructure.
• Strong judgment in technical tradeoffs, backed by lessons learned.
• Evidence of leadership through influence, alignment, and growing others.
• Director candidates must have experience managing managers.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, making tradeoffs, and bringing clarity to complex org structures.
• High level of ownership, accountability, and product intuition.

Benefits and Perks

• Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care
• Mental Wellness Benefit
• Generous Vacation Policy and Additional Company Holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Volunteer Time Off
• Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break

*please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary*

Culture Values

• Make Bold Bets: We choose courageous action over comfortable progress.
• Innovate with Insight: We tackle decisions with rigor and judgment - combining data, experience and collective wisdom to drive powerful outcomes.
• One Team: We collaborate across boundaries to achieve far greater impact than any of us could accomplish alone.
• Candor with Connection: We build meaningful relationships that enable honest feedback and direct conversations.
• Champion the Customer: We seek to deeply understand our customers’ needs, ensuring their success is our north star.
• Powerful Simplicity: We find elegant solutions to complex problems, making sophisticated things accessible.