Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform

About the role

The Engineering Manager, Internal Developer Platform is the builder of golden paths at Chainguard. This is a people-first, technically credible leadership role for someone who believes great infrastructure should disappear into the background — empowering engineers to move faster, safer, and with less friction.

Responsibilities

• Make engineers more productive every day. Continuously improve the systems, workflows, and tooling that support software development across Chainguard.
• Create opinionated, self-service platform capabilities that allow engineering teams to focus on solving customer problems rather than managing infrastructure.
• Own and evolve our software delivery systems, ensuring builds, testing, releases, and deployments are fast, reliable, secure, and scalable.
• Drive operational excellence through SLOs, observability, automation, capacity planning, and continuous improvement.
• Lead a highly experienced team of senior and principal engineers. Remove obstacles, create clarity, and foster an environment where engineers can do exceptional work.
• Partner closely with application teams, security teams, and engineering leadership to understand developer needs and prioritize platform investments.

Requirements

• 2–3+ years of engineering management experience for Manager level; 5–10+ years for Senior Manager level.
• Proven experience managing highly experienced and senior engineers — including principal-level talent.
• Comfort with the compensation dynamics of managing senior individual contributors.
• Strong coaching, communication, and organizational skills.
• Technical enough to read and occasionally contribute to code — this is not a pure people management role. Chainguard managers are expected to stay technically engaged.
• Background in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure.
• Understanding of and appreciation for the open source and security world.
• Experience building and operating Internal Developer Platforms, golden path tooling, or similar engineering productivity systems.

Qualifications

• Strong Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure experience.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation and GitOps workflows.
• Deep experience with GitHub and/or GitLab administration, workflows, and CI/CD systems.

Skills

• Technical leadership and strategic thinking.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to balance technical depth with business acumen.
• Experience with incident management, SLOs, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence.

Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
• Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.

Pay

Base Salary Range: $205,000 - $230,000 USD

Schedule

Remote-first with occasional in-person meetings.