The group is growing, and you'll be one of its experienced managers.
You'll join a director who shares the vision with you, tech leads who drive design day to day, and engineers who already run the platform at this scale. What we need is the experience of having grown a group like this before.
What you own. You lead a team of infrastructure platform engineers, with a tech lead as your partner. Your tech lead drives technical design day to day. You own the people, how the work runs, and whether it lands. You're also technical enough to challenge any design in the room. You help set the vision with the director, and as the group grows, you'll help shape how it's organised.
Working across the stack. Our engineers are expected to know the whole stack and go deep in part of it: Kubernetes compute, Kafka, networking and observability. You'll lead people across that stack, not a single component.
Your day to day. A typical week mixes 1:1s and planning with your team, design reviews with your tech lead, a look at what production taught us that week, and time with R&D teams and the director on what comes next.
What you'll do
Take strong engineers from good to great. The foundation is here: the engineers you'll lead are strong. Stretch them, develop the next leads from inside, and hire to the same bar.
Foster a culture of focused execution. Keep the team on a few clear priorities and see the work through to done. When priorities shift, re-plan fast and keep the team focused. Drive innovation forward by making room for the ideas that change how the platform works.
Make production the feedback loop for design. Keep the platform stable, and make sure the team learns from running it. Incidents, alerts and on-call show what to do differently, and the follow-up is often a change to the design, not a new line in a runbook.
Challenge and lead technical solutions. Sit in design reviews with your tech lead and senior engineers. Ask the questions that change the design. Push for adopting what already exists before building something new.
Own your team's scope. Decide what the team takes on, what it owns and when to say no, and keep commitments honest. Back those calls with your team's data (load, incidents, on-call cost and delivery) and use it to argue for change.
Work across team lines. Together with the director, work with R&D teams and the sister group so that platform changes are announced, adopted and owned.
Requirements: You've managed infrastructure engineers for several years. That could be platform, DevOps or SRE engineers, and some of the people you grew have gone on to grow past you.
You did it at a company running Kubernetes at large scale, through real growth. Think thousands of nodes, many clusters and real traffic, with the team, the systems and the processes all scaling at the same time.
Your technical roots go deep.
You were an engineer in this stack: Kubernetes internals, cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP, and distributed systems that fail in interesting ways.
You've also worked with the rest of our stack, even where you weren't the expert:
Kafka at scale
Networking and service mesh in production: Istio, Envoy, Cilium or equivalent
Infrastructure as code and GitOps: Terraform, ArgoCD or equivalent
You can still review a design doc or Kubernetes operator code and say what's wrong with it.
Engineers come to you for technical advice, not only for 1:1s.
You've introduced habits that stuck. A delivery process, an on-call or incident practice, a definition of done. Tell us what changed and how you knew it had.
You can say no. You set boundaries with other teams without damaging the relationship.
You're curious. You go deep into an unfamiliar domain because you want to understand it.
You want to build. You're looking for impact, not a team to keep steady.
This position is open to all candidates.