Platform Engineering Manager

Role & responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of Platform, DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Engineers responsible for internal developer platforms.
• Define and execute the platform engineering strategy and roadmap aligned with engineering and business objectives.
• Design and operate scalable, secure, highly available cloud-native platform infrastructure.
• Build and evolve Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that enable engineering teams to self-service infrastructure and application capabilities.
• Establish golden paths, reusable templates, platform APIs, and standardized development workflows to improve developer productivity.
• Own Kubernetes platforms and container orchestration across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, CI/CD, and automated provisioning.
• Build tooling and automation that simplify application deployment, infrastructure management, configuration, and environment creation.
• Establish strong observability, reliability, security, and operational standards across the platform.
• Define and track platform KPIs such as developer adoption, deployment frequency, platform availability, lead time, reliability, and developer experience.
• Partner with Software Engineering, SRE, Security, Architecture, Data, and Product teams to understand platform requirements.
• Ensure platform services meet requirements for security, compliance, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Lead resolution of major platform incidents and drive root-cause analysis and preventive improvements.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure and platform resources through capacity planning and FinOps practices.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine their suitability for the organization's platform ecosystem.
• Establish engineering standards, conduct architecture/design reviews, and maintain technical documentation.
• Mentor engineers, manage performance and career development, and build a culture of automation, ownership, reliability, and continuous improvement.
• Manage platform projects, priorities, budgets, vendors, and cross-functional dependencies.

Preferred candidate profile

• 5 to 10 years of experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Cloud Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or related fields, with technical leadership experience.
• Strong hands-on expertise in AWS, Azure, or GCP and cloud-native architecture.
• Deep experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, Ansible, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong understanding of Internal Developer Platforms, developer self-service, platform APIs, golden paths, and developer experience.
• Experience with Backstage or comparable developer portals/platform tooling is highly desirable.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD and GitOps, including Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong proficiency in Linux, networking, security, IAM, secrets management, and cloud infrastructure.
• Programming/scripting experience in Go, Python, Bash, or similar languages.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, service mesh, and system design.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/OpenSearch, Datadog, or comparable observability platforms.
• Knowledge of SRE principles, SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, incident management, reliability engineering, and disaster recovery.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization, capacity planning, and FinOps is an advantage.
• Demonstrated experience building platforms that improve developer productivity, deployment velocity, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Strong technical leadership, people management, mentoring, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to balance developer experience, platform reliability, security, scalability, and infrastructure cost.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline; Master's degree is a plus.
• Certifications such as AWS/Azure/GCP, CKA/CKS, Terraform, or other CNCF/cloud certifications are advantageous.