Senior Manager – Data Engineering & Machine Learning

Description

At Catawiki, every day brings the extraordinary! Whether it’s Daniel Ricciardo’s Formula 1 Car , a Woolly Mammoth’s Skeleton , Lady Gaga's Jumpsuit or Usain Bolt’s running shoe , we encounter exceptional objects every day.

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 passionate 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. If these values resonate with you, we’d love to explore how you can join us.

Taking ownership and driving impact

Being open to change and feedback

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Lead and develop the team: Set direction, coach experienced specialists and create clear ownership across Data Engineering and Machine Learning.
• Build dependable data foundations: Improve the pipelines, integrations and infrastructure the wider Data team relies on for analysis, reporting and machine learning.
• Strengthen production ML: Improve deployment, monitoring and operational follow-through for production models, so teams can run them reliably and resolve issues effectively.
• Advance marketplace models: Help teams improve recommendation, cancellation and bidder-risk use cases, connecting model performance to meaningful product outcomes.
• Set direction and priorities: Work with Product, Engineering, Analytics and business partners to choose high-value problems and balance delivery, reliability and long-term platform health.
• Shape the technology strategy: Reporting to the SVP Engineering, you’ll join the Engineering Management team and help shape the direction of the Technology department.
• What you'll bring
• You combine strong technical judgement with experienced people leadership. You create clarity in a complex environment, empower specialists and make sound decisions across both disciplines.
• Your experience will include the following. Familiarity with Catawiki’s current stack is useful, and equivalent experience with other platforms is welcome.
• Technical depth in one discipline: Deep experience designing, building and operating data-intensive systems in Data Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering, with practical knowledge of the other.
• People leadership: Experience leading experienced engineers or ML specialists, coaching their growth and setting clear expectations.
• Architecture and systems thinking: Ability to evaluate trade-offs and guide architecture for data platforms, distributed systems and production infrastructure.
• Production ML understanding: Experience with the deployment, monitoring and operation of machine learning systems in production.
• Business and product judgement: Ability to connect technical work to business goals, make priority calls and assess outcomes.
• Relevant cloud platform experience: We run on GCP using BigQuery, Vertex AI and Kubernetes. Experience with equivalent AWS services is also relevant.
• Streaming and integration experience: Kafka, event-driven systems or modern data integration tools are useful.
• Clear communication: Ability to explain technical trade-offs and align technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Conditions

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 €100 Catavoucher when you join, a €50 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.

Interested?

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support the review of your application. AI may help us assess how your experience matches the requirements of the role, but hiring decisions are always made by our recruitment team