Engineering Manager, Delivery & Platform

Engineering Manager, Delivery & Platform

Engineering Manager, Delivery & Platform for an early-stage technology business, taking ownership of engineering delivery, platform infrastructure, production operations and the build-out of a high-performing engineering team.

Location: United States, North America, Central America, South America

Reports to: Founders

Type: Full-time

Organisation Overview

Our client is an early-stage technology business building a high-stakes product where engineering quality, operational resilience and safe delivery are critical.

The existing environment is close to greenfield, with a contractor-built codebase that now needs to be converted into an internally owned, scalable and well-governed engineering platform. As the organisation develops, the priority is to establish the processes, infrastructure and technical standards that allow a small engineering team to build, test, deploy and operate safely.

An Application Engineering Lead will own functional requirements and product-domain correctness, working in close partnership with this appointment.

The Appointment.

This is a hands-on player-coach position and the first Engineering Manager appointment within the business.

The Engineering Manager will take ownership of how engineering work gets done: establishing the SDLC and delivery process, setting the engineering quality and reliability bar, building the underlying platform and production environment, and subsequently hiring and leading a team of 3–5 engineers.

The centre of gravity is non-functional engineering: process, execution, operability, reliability, security of the change path and ensuring that systems can be safely modified by other engineers.

This remains a technically active role. The successful candidate will continue to read, write and review production code and will need the systems judgement to prevent unsafe changes and design the platform on which the application operates.

During the first 6–9 months, the majority of the role will focus on hands-on platform and process work, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, environments, migrations and runbooks. As the team grows, the Engineering Manager will retain a meaningful individual-contributor workload while assuming responsibility for planning, design reviews, hiring and team leadership.

Key Resposibilities

·  Lead engineering design and work-breakdown sessions, converting abstract initiatives into clearly sequenced and executable work packages.

·  Establish the engineering quality bar through design documentation, pull-request review, pairing and a disciplined approach to preventing unsafe changes.

·  Read, write and review production code across TypeScript/JavaScript and, where appropriate, Go or Bash, with particular emphasis on testability, operability and change safety.

·  Own the SDLC and delivery platform, including GitHub standards, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, environment promotion, deployment controls, schema changes and production release processes.

·  Establish consistent observability across the platform, including logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, monitors and SLIs/SLOs, while contributing to an effective and sustainable on-call model.

·  Build the documentation and operational foundations of the engineering organisation, including runbooks, architecture notes and an effective onboarding path.

·  Recruit, mentor and lead the first 3–5 engineers, while converting contractor-developed systems into internally owned, maintainable and reviewable engineering assets.

·  Run lightweight engineering planning, contribute to roadmap development, build consensus around technical decisions and determine when risk or engineering quality requires a change to be blocked.

Experience and Capability

·  15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 10 years as a hands-on individual contributor and at least 5 years of genuine people-management responsibility.

·  Demonstrable experience establishing engineering delivery processes and production operations for systems where correctness under change is critical, including payments, trading, regulated backends or similarly high-stakes platforms.

·  Strong ability to take ambiguous initiatives, determine the underlying requirements, reduce scope where necessary and decompose work into deliverable engineering tasks.

·  Strong computer science and systems fundamentals, including concurrency, failure modes, data structures, architecture, service boundaries and distributed-systems trade-offs.

·  Hands-on experience building and reviewing testable production software, including unit and integration testing, together with practical knowledge of HTTP, gRPC or equivalent technologies, websockets, backpressure and relevant network fundamentals.

·  Practical knowledge of relational databases and Redis or similar technologies, including indexes, replicas, partitioning and disciplined schema migration, alongside sound judgement around locking, caching, queues and idempotency.

·  Strong production-platform experience covering load balancing, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, telemetry and on-call operations.

·  Relevant experience across technologies including TypeScript, Node.js, gRPC, Redis, Postgres, GitHub Actions, container images, Helm or equivalent, GitOps platforms such as Argo CD, Datadog or equivalent observability tooling, and Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code technology.

Leadership and Stakeholder Context

This is a highly visible appointment reporting directly to the Founders and working closely with the Application Engineering Lead.

The Engineering Manager will be responsible for creating the engineering environment in which a small team can ship safely and effectively. This requires someone capable of moving between hands-on technical execution, architecture and design review, engineering process, recruitment, mentoring and team leadership without becoming detached from the codebase.

The role requires strong judgement around when to build consensus, when to compromise and when correctness, operability or risk requires a proposed change to be blocked. It is not a conventional people-management position, a purely architectural role or an opportunity to introduce unnecessary process. The objective is to establish the minimum effective structure required for a small engineering organisation to build and operate safely at scale.

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