Engineering Manager, Platform
Finch
What You'll Do
- Live by and champion our values: #empathy, #execution, #humility, #curiosity.
- Manage and grow a 5-person platform engineering team: hiring, 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, and fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration.
- Own the platform roadmap alongside senior engineers— prioritize across infrastructure stability, developer tooling, security, and architectural improvements (monolith decomposition, database scaling, observability strategy).
- Make technical trade-off decisions: tech debt vs. new capabilities, build vs. buy, optimize vs. rewrite. You stay close enough to the code to review Terraform and make informed architectural decisions.
- Partner with product engineering teams and leadership to align platform investments with company priorities and communicate platform constraints and trade-offs.
- Set platform engineering standards and best practices across infrastructure-as-code, observability, deployment practices, and incident response.
- Drive continuous improvement of team productivity, engineering processes, and delivery efficiency.
What You'll Bring
- 7+ years of software engineering experience with significant focus on platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps work; 2+ years of which include people-management experience.
- Hands-on platform engineering background— You've built infrastructure, written Terraform, debugged Kubernetes, or improved CI/CD pipelines yourself.
- Proven ability to manage engineering teams through complex technical projects with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and cross-team dependencies.
- Track record of growing and developing engineers, including performance management, career development, and difficult conversations.
- Experience prioritizing large backlogs and making trade-offs between tech debt, new features, stability, and developer experience.
- Strong technical communication skills— You can explain infrastructure trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and advocate for platform investments.
- Ability to balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership— You stay close enough to the code to maintain credibility and make informed decisions.
- Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure improvements that enable product engineering velocity.
- Bonus: Led a platform or infrastructure team before, experience with high-growth engineering organizations, security/compliance background (PII encryption, SOC2), experience managing distributed or remote teams.
Success Looks Like
- Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking
- Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus.
- CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
- Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred)
- Experience using a distributed messaging system.
- Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
- Proven people management: 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, conflict resolution.
- Roadmap planning and prioritization across competing demands.
- Cross-functional stakeholder management and communication.
- Hiring and building high-performing teams.
- Creating engineering culture and setting technical standards.
What We Offer
- Flexible monthly stipend
- 100% Health/Dental/Vision coverage and 85% dependent coverage
- Unlimited vacation policy (with 3 weeks minimum)
- Parental leave
- 401(k)
- Offsite company trips
- Offices in SF & NYC
210000 - 230000 USD a year