Job Description

HNI Corporation is a global family of brands for the workplace and home dedicated to enhancing the spaces where we live, work, and gather. We pride ourselves on fostering an environment where we make a positive impact on others; upholding our beliefs in integrity, inclusion and belonging.

Your Impact Starts the Day You Do!

What We Need:

We are looking for a Manager, Data Engineering - Platform to join our Decision Science team. This position can be located in Muscatine, Iowa or Chicago, IL.

The Manager, Data Platform will lead a small team of data engineers building the data foundation that powers HNI’s BI, analytics, applications, and growing AI capabilities. This is a hands-on player-coach role, leading both people and platform engineering across Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks while establishing standards and practices that help the organization move faster.

The ideal candidate brings strong experience with data integration, Python, SQL, orchestration, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD, with hands-on expertise across APIs, ERP systems, and vendor data. Strong technical leadership and a passion for developing high-performing teams are essential.

What You Will Do:

Platform Roadmap and Strategy

• Assist in defining the strategy, standards, and roadmap for the enterprise data platform, including ingestion, integration, orchestration, and infrastructure.
• Work closely with the Business Intelligence, Decision Science, and Digital Experience teams to understand source data needs and translate them into platform capabilities.
• Evaluate and pilot new tools and services to make build-versus-buy recommendations that balance capability, cost, and supportability.
• Lead the design and implementation of the cloud data platform architecture on Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks.
• Partnering with Infrastructure, Security, and Enterprise Architecture to ensure platform designs meet HNI standards for security, compliance, and cost.

Platform Architecture and Engineering

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable pipelines using Python, SQL, and Prefect that land source data reliably in the raw layer and deliver it to downstream applications, operational systems, and third-party tools.
• Build and support data integration from third-party APIs, ERP systems, flat files, and vendor feeds, including authentication, incremental, and change-data-capture patterns.
• Maintain the enterprise data lake on Azure Data Lake Storage, including layer structure, file formats, partitioning, and retention.
• Optimize load performance, reliability, and compute cost across the cloud data warehouse and lakehouse.
• Manage platform infrastructure as code using Terraform or Pulumi, and implement data governance, security, and compliance frameworks.
• Support HNI's growing AI toolset with the governed data and secure access patterns that AI services and agent-based tools depend on.

Platform Service and Delivery

• Oversee the implementation of CI/CD frameworks for automating data workflows, ensuring code quality, and streamlining deployments.
• Provide orchestration as a service to the Business Intelligence and analytics teams, including scheduling, dependency management, alerting, and deployment support for the pipelines those teams own.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation, and environment promotion.
• Own the operational health of the platform, including incident response, root cause analysis, and cost management.

Team Leadership and Member Development

• Lead and mentor a small team of data engineers as a player-coach, contributing directly to design and code while building the capability of the team.
• Support member development through individual development plans, career pathing, and regular feedback and performance conversations.
• Foster an engaged, inclusive team environment consistent with HNI's member-owner culture, including recruiting, onboarding, and retention of technical talent.
• Define platform KPIs and success metrics and stay ahead of emerging technologies.

What You Have:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering or data platform engineering on a major cloud platform. Azure is preferred; AWS or GCP experience will be considered.
• 2+ years of experience leading, mentoring, or managing a team of data engineers.
• Expertise in SQL and Python, with hands-on experience building production ingestion and delivery pipelines across third-party APIs (REST and SOAP), ERP systems such as Oracle EBS or SAP, and file-based sources.
• Hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse or lakehouse (Snowflake preferred; Databricks, Redshift, or BigQuery considered), including bulk and continuous loading, security model, and cost management.
• Experience building and maintaining a cloud data lake (ADLS, S3, or GCS), including layered structure and open file formats.
• Production experience with modern orchestration frameworks such as Prefect, Airflow, or Dagster, including supporting pipelines owned by other teams.
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or Pulumi), containerized workloads, and CI/CD frameworks with Git-based version control.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, governance, and security best practices in cloud environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications in cloud data platform technologies such as Azure, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• Familiarity with dbt and the downstream transformation workflows owned by the Business Intelligence and analytics teams.
• Knowledge of streaming or event-driven data architectures (e.g., Kafka, Event Hubs) and data observability tooling.
• Experience enabling AI or agent-based workloads on a modern data platform.

We look forward to hearing from you!