Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

WHAT YOU'LL DO

The Platform Engineering Manager leads a team of highly skilled engineers tasked with building and managing a robust, automated platform that abstracts infrastructure complexities and enables seamless application deployment and operations. This role combines technical leadership, engineering management, and product management expertise to deliver platform services that align with organizational needs and provide exceptional value to internal customers.

This manager is responsible for defining and executing a vision for platform services as products, including gathering requirements, prioritizing work based on business value, and ensuring adoption and satisfaction among engineering teams. Collaboration with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is critical to embedding reliability practices and achieving operational excellence.

This role is ideal for a leader who thrives at the intersection of engineering and product management, excelling in empowering teams to build platform services that are reliable, scalable, and impactful. By combining technical expertise, product ownership, and strong leadership, the Platform Engineering Manager ensures that the team drives innovation and accelerates the organization’s ability to deliver exceptional outcomes.

Main responsibilities:

1. Leadership and People Management:

   • Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of platform engineers (Platform Software Engineers and Platform Infrastructure Engineers)

   • Foster an inclusive and collaborative culture where engineers thrive and are empowered to innovate

   • Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning to support team member growth and engagement

2. Product Management for Platform Services:

   • Define platform services as products with clear business value, user personas, and success metrics

   • Engage with internal engineering teams (users of the platform) to gather requirements and feedback

   • Prioritize features and initiatives based on business impact, user needs, and technical feasibility

   • Develop roadmaps for platform products, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and the overall Infrastructure vision

   • Communicate the value of platform services to stakeholders, driving adoption and ensuring satisfaction

3. Technical Strategy and Decision-Making:

   • Provide technical leadership to guide architectural decisions, scalability strategies, and system design

   • Lead trade-off discussions between reliability, scalability, and feature development to balance short- and long-term goals

   • Advocate for best practices in platform engineering, including automation, observability, and secure design principles

4. Collaboration with SREs:

   • Partner closely with SRE leadership and embedded SREs to ensure platform reliability aligns with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets

   • Collaborate on monitoring, alerting, and proactive system health initiatives to reduce downtime and enhance stability

   • Ensure a seamless partnership between platform engineers and SREs to drive a culture of operational excellence

5. Operational Excellence:

   • Implement and advocate for processes that reduce operational toil and increase team efficiency

   • Lead incident management efforts, including response coordination and post-mortem reviews, to improve reliability

   • Ensure all platform services meet high availability, fault tolerance, and security standards

6. Execution and Delivery:

   • Manage multiple concurrent projects using sound project management principles to ensure timely delivery

   • Establish and track success metrics, milestones, and timelines for team initiatives

   • Drive a continuous improvement mindset within the team, iterating on processes and platform capabilities

WHO YOU ARE

Experience:

• 5-7+ years in platform engineering, DevOps, or a related field with increasing responsibility

• Demonstrated experience managing and mentoring engineering teams, fostering a culture of collaboration and excellence

• Strong track record of owning and delivering platform services that drive significant business value

• Hands-on experience with building and scaling internal platforms, ideally with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and CI/CD pipelines

Skills:

• Strong product management capabilities, including gathering requirements, defining user stories, and managing feature prioritization

• Exceptional technical skills, with expertise in platform engineering principles, automation, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform)

• Ability to effectively prioritize workstreams based on business value and technical feasibility

• Excellent project management skills, with the ability to balance competing priorities and deliver high-impact results

Collaboration:

• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration and relationship-building skills, with a focus on alignment across engineering, leadership, and internal stakeholders

• Comfortable working with SREs and other engineering functions to achieve shared reliability and operational goals

• Strong communicator, capable of articulating complex ideas and decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

Mindset:

• Product-first mindset: passionate about building internal tools and services that deliver exceptional value to their users

• High level of ownership and accountability, with a commitment to quality and operational excellence

• Forward-thinking and innovative, always seeking ways to improve platform capabilities and developer experience

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $160,162 and $282,952/year with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $180,000 and $318,000/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, Braze offers full- and part- time employees a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that all Braze employees own a piece of our company.

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