Sr. Technical Product & Program Manager, Platform Engineering

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company offering investing, savings, retirement solutions, and financial wellness tools, including 401(k) plans for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about empowering people to build wealth with confidence and ease. This role is based in our NYC office and follows a hybrid schedule (four days per week in-office, with no required office days during summer and winter holidays).

About the Role

The Platform Engineering organization’s mission is to enable engineers across the company to ship good code quickly, sustainably, and enjoyably. As a Senior Technical Program & Product Manager within Platform Engineering, you will partner with team leaders to understand organizational needs, align on priorities, and help craft and manage roadmaps for platform capabilities that support Betterment’s engineering organization.

Working with Platform Engineering leaders, you will help define and prioritize initiatives that enable the company to:

• Power Product Innovation: Partner with product engineering teams to develop scalable platform services, tooling, and shared components that help teams ship new features faster and more safely.
• Standardize & Simplify: Collaborate on standards, frameworks, best practices, and migration paths that reduce fragmentation and make it easier for teams to build and operate services.
• Maximize Efficiency: Identify opportunities with platform teams to improve reliability and operational excellence through automation, workflow simplification, and performance optimization.
• Minimize Risk: Help align platform investments with the security, stability, resilience, compliance, observability, and disaster-readiness needs of the organization.

You will lead highly technical, cross-team initiatives end-to-end: framing the problem, aligning stakeholders, driving execution, surfacing risks, and measuring outcomes. You will work closely with the leaders of SRE Infra Enablement, Developer Experience, Security, and API & Auth Platform, as well as product engineering and other partners who depend on these capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Partner with SRE Infra Enablement, Developer Experience, Security, and API & Auth Platform leaders to understand their strategies, constraints, dependencies, and investment choices.
• Help facilitate a recurring roadmap process that turns technical opportunities, operational pain points, and partner needs into clear priorities and sequenced investments.
• Work with engineering leaders and senior technical staff to clarify the problem, define the desired outcome, evaluate options, and document decisions and tradeoffs.
• Track progress against roadmap commitments and platform outcomes, surfacing risks, dependencies, and decisions early rather than simply reporting status.
• Help teams make explicit tradeoffs when capacity is limited: what we will do, what we will defer, what we will stop doing, and what support or adoption is required from partner teams.
• Partner with product engineering teams to understand adoption barriers and ensure that platform capabilities are usable, well-documented, and supported in practice.
• Define and track measures of success such as reliability, security posture, developer experience, adoption, delivery efficiency, operational burden, and service performance.
• Coordinate cross-team execution for initiatives that span multiple platform areas, including migrations, standards, shared services, and changes to engineering workflows.
• Prepare concise updates and decision documents for platform leadership, with a clear point of view and explicit asks when leadership input is required.

Requirements

• Strong experience shaping and executing roadmaps for backend platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, SRE, security, APIs, authentication, or related technical domains.
• Experience leading complex, cross-team programs where success depended on influence, adoption, and sustained partnership rather than direct authority.
• Technical depth sufficient to work effectively with senior engineers on backend architecture, operational tradeoffs, reliability, security, developer workflows, or platform APIs.
• A demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into clear decisions, priorities, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Experience balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health, including standards, migrations, deprecations, reliability improvements, and operational readiness.
• Strong judgment about how to prioritize shared platform investments when different teams have legitimate but competing needs.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and senior leaders.
• A collaborative, low-ego working style and a willingness to go deep enough to understand the problem without taking ownership away from the engineering leaders and teams doing the work.
• Data-informed decision making, with the ability to define and use metrics related to reliability, security, adoption, developer experience, and efficiency.

Benefits

• Health & Wellness: Medical, dental, and vision coverage; life and AD&D insurance; short- and long-term disability; infertility support and WPATH-aligned transgender health benefits; Employee Assistance Program (EAP); transit benefits; FSA and HSA options.
• Ownership: Equity for all employees, including new hire and refresher grants.
• Time Off: Flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, and a fully paid four-week sabbatical in your sixth year.
• Growth: Company-paid professional coaching for all employees.
• Wealth: Day-one 401(k) match plus matching on qualified student loan payments.

Pay

New York City: $125,000–$145,000 base salary. This role may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

Core Values

• We change lives: Be part of a community of innovators working to transform financial outcomes for real people. Your work will make an impact, always laddering up to our mission to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.
• We set audacious goals: We set them for the company, our customers, and ourselves, and we won’t stop until we reach them. We don’t just show up; we give our all, then celebrate our wins.
• We value all perspectives: When we collaborate, we're at our best. We believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes and strive to uphold our supportive and inclusive community.
• We simplify financial services: We’re financial services pioneers, always finding new ways to improve, optimize, and enhance. Constant improvement is in our DNA.