Engineering Manager

About the role

Finch's Platform team owns the infrastructure and developer experience that powers our engineering organization. You'll lead a 4-5 person team with a high-impact backlog spanning infrastructure stability, developer tooling, architectural decomposition, and security. The team handles tech debt paydown (CI reliability, observability consolidation), security work (PII encryption, data contamination prevention), and architectural decisions (monolith decomposition, database scaling). This is high-leverage infrastructure work that enables the entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking.
• Strong knowledge of testing best practices; TDD is a bonus.
• Experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent).
• Experience working with AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred).
• Experience using a distributed messaging system.
• Familiarity with 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.