Mgr, Engineering

About the role

You will provide technical leadership for Thrivent's Engineering Productivity ecosystem, including our Internal Developer Platform (IDP), self-service engineering capabilities, and developer experience initiatives. You will own the vision, strategy, and evolution of platform capabilities that enable engineers to build, deploy, and operate software more effectively.

Responsibilities

• Own the health, reliability, security, scalability, and long-term sustainability of Thrivent's Engineering Productivity platforms and Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
• Balance delivery of new capabilities with platform maintenance, technical debt reduction, modernization efforts, and lifecycle management of legacy solutions.
• Drive platform stability through proactive monitoring, operational excellence, reliability engineering practices, and continuous improvement.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, architectural guardrails, and platform governance practices that support enterprise-scale adoption.
• Lead the strategy and evolution of self-service engineering capabilities that improve the software development lifecycle and reduce developer friction.
• Translate developer pain points into platform capabilities, golden paths, paved-road experiences, and reusable engineering solutions.
• Create intuitive, scalable solutions that enable engineers to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, manage services, and access development resources independently.
• Measure success through platform adoption, developer satisfaction, productivity gains, and reduced operational burden rather than feature output alone.
• Define and drive the roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring it delivers measurable value across engineering teams.
• Build and evolve platform capabilities that simplify software delivery, improve consistency, and accelerate engineering velocity.
• Partner with engineering teams to understand workflow challenges and continuously refine platform experiences based on feedback and usage patterns.
• Drive adoption initiatives through enablement, education, documentation, and hands-on engagement with engineering teams.
• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and engineering practices—including Generative AI and AI-assisted development capabilities—to improve software quality and developer productivity.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and responsible innovation.
• Lead proof-of-concepts, pilot programs, and experiential learning initiatives that validate new platform capabilities before scaling.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive work, streamline delivery processes, and improve the overall developer experience.
• Provide architectural guidance and technical leadership across engineering teams.
• Mentor and coach engineers on platform engineering, developer experience, cloud-native development, automation, and operational excellence.
• Promote knowledge sharing and create mechanisms for teams to learn from successes and failures.
• Influence engineering strategy and platform investments through data-driven recommendations and industry best practices.

Qualifications & Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other technical field or equivalent work experience
• 8+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, or related technology disciplines, with a track record of improving engineering effectiveness and operational outcomes.
• 3+ years of leadership experience driving technical strategy, execution, and continuous improvement across engineering teams.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience leading technical teams responsible for shared engineering capabilities, with demonstrated success developing talent and fostering technical excellence.
• Experience building, operating, and evolving an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated success implementing golden paths, paved roads, self-service engineering capabilities, and developer productivity tooling.
• Experience defining platform success metrics, including adoption, developer satisfaction, deployment efficiency, lead time reduction, and friction reduction.
• Experience improving developer experience through platform engineering and adoption-focused product thinking.
• Demonstrated leadership and experience managing multidiscipline, high-performance work teams.
• Strong competency in project management and execution of multiple or large projects.
• Strong understanding of platform engineering, DevOps, cloud-native architectures, CI/CD, developer portals, infrastructure automation, and software delivery platforms.
• Experience working with customers to develop solutions to complex business problems.
• Proven ability to communicate effectively with internal/external stakeholders to support business initiatives.
• Proven ability to function in an environment which requires flexibility with the ability to make decisions based on limited information.
• Ability to formulate, implement and evaluate plans, programs and procedures applicable to customer relationship and demand management.

Pay

The applicable salary or hourly wage range for this full-time role is $139,455.00 - $188,676.00 per year, which factors in various geographic regions. The base pay actually offered will be determined by a variety of factors including, but not limited to, location, relevant experience, skills, and knowledge, business needs, market demand, and other factors.

Benefits

The following benefits may be offered: various bonuses (including, for example, annual or long-term incentives); medical, dental, and vision insurance; health savings account; flexible spending account; 401k; pension; life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance; disability insurance; supplemental protection insurance; 20 days of Paid Time Off each year; Sick and Safe Time; 10 paid company holidays; Volunteer Time Off; paid parental leave; EAP; well-being benefits, and other employee benefits. Eligibility for receipt of these benefits is subject to the applicable plan/policy documents.