Engineering Manager, Data Sync

About Ditto: Ditto is redefining how data moves at the edge. Our mission is to make it seamless for developers to build resilient, real-time applications, regardless of network conditions. Whether you're in a stadium, airplane, or remote military base, Ditto's peer-to-peer sync engine ensures devices stay connected and data stays consistent, even without internet. With more than $145 million in funding and trusted by organizations like Chick-fil-A, Delta Airlines, and the U.S. military, Ditto powers mission-critical experiences across aviation, retail, travel, hospitality, defense, and more. As a globally distributed, fast-growing startup, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that reflects the wide range of perspectives needed to solve the world’s hardest connectivity problems. As an Engineering Manager, Data Sync, you will lead the teams responsible for the core technologies that make Ditto work: our data sync engine (including novel replication algorithms and CRDT libraries), our query engine (DQL—a SQL-like language designed for CRDT-based documents), and our embedded database performance. Together, these three workstreams form the technical heart of Ditto’s product. From day one, you will own delivery across these workstreams, working closely with senior engineers who are deep domain experts, and partnering with product managers to translate customer needs into a focused, well-prioritized roadmap. Operating in our async-first culture, you will drive execution through clear written communication, ruthless prioritization, and a relentless focus on shipping. This is a people management role—our Staff+ engineers own the technical depth, and your job is to make them fast, focused, well-supported. Your background in this domain will help guide the team and ensure we’re building in the right direction. Your years of delivering database or adjacent products mean you think about performance, quality gates, and rollout strategies for critical infrastructure. As an Engineering Manager on the Data Sync Team, you will: - Lead, Mentor, and Grow: Guide and grow a combined team of 8–12 engineers across three workstreams (data sync, query engine, and embedded database performance), giving them clarity on priorities and creating the conditions for them to do their best work. - Ship with Velocity: Own delivery across all three workstreams. Break large technical programs into milestones, hold teams accountable, escalate early when things slip, and make trade-off calls between feature work, performance investment, and tech debt—with minimal top-down direction. - Hire Exceptional Engineers: Build and maintain a strong hiring pipeline in a competitive market. Close senior candidates with a compelling pitch and continuously raise our bar. - Partner with Senior ICs: Work closely with senior engineers who are deep technical experts. Provide influence, shield them from organizational friction, and know when to defer versus when to guide more hands on. - Drive Roadmap and Prioritization: Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to shape the team’s roadmap and ensure we’re delivering maximum customer value. - Represent the Team: Communicate the team’s work to leadership, customers, and cross-functional partners. Write status updates that convey signal. Translate between customer pain and engineering investment. - Foster Culture: Cultivate a culture of trust, collaboration, and continual improvement aligned with Ditto’s values, operating effectively in our remote environment. What you’ll need: - Management Experience: 3+ years managing software engineering teams, including responsibilities like hiring, performance management, and career development. - Database domain experience: 5+ years of technical leadership experience, with at least some of that experience in database, storage, or data infrastructure engineering organizations. - Operational excellence: Proven track record of shipping infrastructure or database products on a predictable cadence, with strong instincts around prioritization and scope management. - Distributed systems literacy: Sufficient familiarity with consistency models, conflict resolution, replication topologies, and convergence to be a credible partner to senior engineers—even if you’re not designing the protocols yourself. - A bar-raising ability: Demonstrated ability to hire the best, and grow high-performing teams where database and distributed systems engineers are hard to find. - Product sense: Customer orientation for an infrastructure product. Ability to navigate roadmap trade-offs driven by deals and prioritization calls that require understanding what customers actually need versus what they ask for. Nice to Haves: - Cloud Experience: Experience with AWS (preferred), GCP or Azure, and experience with k8s in production environments. - Familiarity with CRDTs, offline-first architectures, sync algorithms, or local-first software. The technical landscape here is genuinely fascinating—concepts like delta-state CRDTs, causal consistency without coordination, and the challenges described in Kleppmann’s “CRDTs: The Hard Parts”—and we want a manager who finds this intellectually exciting even if they aren’t implementing it themselves. - Background in Rust, C++, or systems-level programming. Managers don’t write production code here, but someone who’s been in the systems world will ramp faster on codebase-level conversations and have better intuitions about performance trade-offs. - Exposure to query engines or query language development. Even indirect experience—having managed an adjacent team, worked on a product with a custom query layer, or evaluated query performance at scale—gives useful context for the DQL workstream. - P2P or mesh networking familiarity. Ditto’s peer-to-peer sync over BLE, Wi-Fi Direct, and LAN is our biggest technical differentiator. Helpful context but not something the manager needs to have shipped before. THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING WITH US We offer competitive salaries and meaningful equity. We believe everyone on the team should have a stake in what we’re building. Benefits vary by region to make sure you're covered in the ways that matter most. In the US, that includes health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance, plus a 401(k) and flexible spending accounts. Regardless of where you live, everyone at Ditto can utilize flexible time off. And while we work remotely, our Atlanta and San Francisco offices are open if you ever want a place to work or meet up with teammates. APPLY ANYWAY At Ditto, we know game-changers don’t always come wrapped in a “perfect” resume. Years of experience? Every single bullet point checked? Meh. That’s not what drives us. What does matter? - Grit. - Curiosity. - Adaptability. - And a genuine spark for what we’re building. So if you’re fired up about our mission but not sure you tick every box - hit that apply button anyway. Use your application to show us how you’ll make an impact here. We’re always on the lookout for exceptional humans who want to grow, stretch, and build something meaningful with us. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER Ditto is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. Ditto is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let us know.