Senior Manager, Engineering

Join Pandora to lead the engineering behind one of the most compelling data challenges in 2026: the Data & AI Platform that sits underneath the world's largest jewellery company. The platform serves teams across consumer engagement, retail, supply chain, finance, merchandising, and manufacturing, operating across more than 100 countries and 6,800 points of sale. How well it is built — and how reliably it runs — sets the ceiling on what the rest of the business can do with data.

This is first and foremost a people leader role. You manage a group of 8–10 engineers organised across several teams, including a Data Platform Architect who sets architectural direction for the platform. Hiring, coaching, one-to-ones, performance, career growth, and team health are the core of your week — not an overhead on top of delivery.

You are also accountable for the engineering delivery of the platform — architecture, reliability, security, cost, and governance — but you get there through the people you lead, not around them. You partner with a Product Director, who owns roadmap and priority, to turn their direction into a plan your teams can execute, and to push back with evidence when trade-offs demand it. You partner with Lead Engineers, Architects, and Enterprise Architects on technical direction, and you represent the team in Pandora-wide architecture and governance forums.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and coach a group of 8–10 engineers across several teams, including a Data Platform Architect. Hire for the gaps, invest in the people already here, run one-to-ones, own performance, and keep the bar high.
• Build and protect a healthy team environment: clear expectations, constructive feedback, and career paths for engineers at every level from early-career to staff+.
• Own the engineering delivery of the Data Platform — architecture, reliability, security, cost, and governance — across Databricks, Power BI, and a further Azure services
• Partner with the Product Director on roadmap and priority; translate direction into a delivery plan your teams can execute, and push back with evidence when trade-offs demand it.
• Partner with Lead Engineers, Architects, and Enterprise Architects on technical direction; be the person who ensures the teams are executing well on the right problems, not just solving any problem well.
• Drive FinOps best practices across the team — cost modelling, forecasting, and reduction where the numbers say you should — so the platform scales cost-effectively as usage grows.
• Champion governance, privacy, and data residency as first-class platform capabilities — access controls, lineage, cataloguing, and policy-as-code.
• Represent the team in Pandora-wide architecture, security, and data governance forums, and influence decisions that land outside your direct org.
• Set the operational bar: SLOs and SLIs, incident response, post-mortems, on-call health, and engineering practices that scale across the teams you lead.

What you bring

• Strong people-leader track record: hiring, coaching, career growth, and performance management for engineers from mid-level to staff+. Experience leading engineers across multiple teams or squads is important here.
• Track record leading the engineering delivery of a data platform, developer platform, or infrastructure team at enterprise scale.
• Experience managing platforms built on Databricks (or an equivalent lakehouse) and working understanding of the Microsoft data ecosystem — Fabric, Power BI, Azure — sufficient to own the platform layer credibly.
• Proven ability to partner with a product counterpart: turn their roadmap into a delivery plan, flag risk early, and push back with evidence when you need to.
• Strong technical fundamentals — can credibly challenge a senior engineer on a design and defend a platform investment to a CFO in the same week.
• Comfort driving FinOps best practices — cost modelling, forecasting, vendor relationships — across cloud and data platform spend.
• Clear, confident communicator with both technical and executive audiences.

Nice to have

• Experience embedding governance automation — access controls, lineage, cataloguing, policy-as-code — as platform capabilities rather than separate tooling.
• Background in retail, consumer products, manufacturing, or another multi-region, multi-domain enterprise.
• Exposure to data mesh or federated data ownership models.
• Time spent as a senior IC earlier in your career — this team values managers who can still weigh in on technical matters.

Icing on the cake

     
You will be working out of our beautiful Head Office in Copenhagen V, established in 2016 and designed to unite and inspire our teams. Besides our beautiful interior design we are also proud of our LEED Gold Certification for Energy and Environmental Design. This means that we use as few natural resources as possible and that we use them with respect. The result is a professional and dynamic space that is unique, comfortable and inspirational – and delivers a true Pandora experience to anyone who works here or comes to visit.     

About Pandora

Pandora is the world's largest jewellery brand, specialising in the design, crafting and marketing of accessible luxury jewellery made from high-quality materials. Each piece is created to inspire self-expression, allowing people to share their stories and passions through meaningful jewellery. Pandora jewellery is sold in more than 100 countries through 7,000 points of sale, including more than 2,800 concept stores. 

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Pandora employs around 39,000 people worldwide and crafts its jewellery with 100% recycled silver and gold. Pandora is committed to leadership in sustainability and has set out to halve greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain by 2030. Pandora is listed on the Nasdaq Copenhagen stock exchange and generated revenue of DKK 32.5 billion (EUR 4.4 billion) in 2025. 

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