Engineering Manager (Platform)

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• $1K to build your home office
• 401(k) retirement program
• Equity to full-time teammates
• Stipend for co-working spaces
• $100/month wellness stipend
• Professional development budget
• $600/month stipend for groceries
• Company-wide off-sites twice a year- Hands-on platform engineering background— You’ve built infrastructure, written Terraform, debugged Kubernetes, or improved CI/CD pipelines yourself
• Track record of growing and developing engineers, including performance management, career development, and difficult conversations
• 7+ years of software engineering experience with significant focus on platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps work; 2+ years of which include people-management experience
• 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
• Experience prioritizing large backlogs and making trade-offs between tech debt, new features, stability, and developer experience
• Proven ability to manage engineering teams through complex technical projects with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and cross-team dependencies
• Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure improvements that enable product engineering velocity
• Ability to balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership— You stay close enough to the code to maintain credibility and make informed decisions
• Strong technical communication skills— You can explain infrastructure trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and advocate for platform investments
• Cross-functional stakeholder management and communication
• Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking
• Experience using a distributed messaging system
• Proven people management: 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, conflict resolution
• Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred)
• Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus
• CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Hiring and building high-performing teams
• Roadmap planning and prioritization across competing demands
• Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
• Creating engineering culture and setting technical standards