Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

TruLegal is representing an innovative, bleeding edge global law firm who is bringing on an Engineering Manager for Platform Engineering to lead and grow the team responsible for its internal developer platform and the reusable tools, services, and infrastructure that support engineering teams across the firm. This new and exciting role combines people management with hands-on technical leadership, with responsibility for team development, platform strategy and roadmap, delivery, reliability, security, and operational excellence. The successful candidate will bring a strong prior engineering background across Go/Python, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and GitOps, AWS and Azure, Kubernetes, observability/SRE, platform security, and test automation, along with proven experience hiring, coaching, and developing engineers. Agile experience is essential, and this individual will partner closely with development teams, business stakeholders, and IT leadership to align platform investments with firm needs while driving scalable and standardized engineering practices. New York and Washington, D.C. are the preferred locations, with potential flexibility for candidates in Dallas or Houston. Ideal candidates will come from the tech industry and bring a creative and disruptive approach to leading this function.

Technology Stack

• CI/CD, Source Control & Test Automation: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Git, JFrog Artifactory, Playwright, pytest/JUnit
• Infrastructure & Configuration as Code: Terraform, Ansible, Bicep/ARM, Helm, Kustomize, GitOps using Argo CD and Flux
• Cloud & Orchestration: AWS, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes
• AI Inference & Application Infrastructure: Frontier and open-weight models through Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, and Amazon Bedrock, model gateways and routing, retrieval and hybrid search, document ingestion, tool/function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and agent orchestration
• AI Evaluation & Quality: Evaluation harnesses and golden datasets, LLM-as-judge and human-in-the-loop review, regression suites, and red-teaming
• Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, Elastic/ELK, OpenTelemetry, GenAI tracing, and token, latency, and cost telemetry
• Platform Security & Policy-as-Code: HashiCorp Vault, OPA/Conftest, SAST/DAST
• Developer Portal & Self-Service: Internal developer portals, CLIs/SDKs, and APIs

Team Management

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of platform engineers while fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing engineering culture
• Manage performance, career development, goal setting, and retention while providing regular and actionable feedback
• Balance individual professional development with team delivery, removing obstacles and helping engineers succeed

Planning & Delivery

• Own the Platform Engineering roadmap and execution, translating firm and engineering strategy into prioritized and appropriately scoped technical initiatives
• Drive predictable, high-quality delivery through effective planning, execution, and risk management
• Establish and manage the team's operating rhythm, including planning, standups, code reviews, retrospectives, and on-call responsibilities

Engineering Direction

• Review technical designs and code, provide architectural direction, and guide sound engineering trade-offs
• Help define platform architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical direction
• Promote a code-first, everything-as-code culture with measurable improvements to the developer experience
• Ensure platform standards extend to AI systems, including version-controlled prompts, retrieval configurations, evaluations, and release processes alongside application code

Platform Operations & Security

• Maintain accountability for platform reliability, SLOs, incident management, on-call health, and continued improvements to operational maturity
• Ensure strong pipelines-as-code, release-management, and test-automation practices that support safe and frequent software delivery
• Ensure platform security and compliance requirements are met in partnership with security and governance teams
• Ensure AI platforms account for operational and security considerations including provider outages, model failover and graceful degradation, non-deterministic failures, quality regressions following model updates, inference and GPU costs, prompt-injection and data-exfiltration risks, output filtering, and confidentiality requirements

Business & Vendor Partnerships

• Collaborate with development teams, business stakeholders, and IT leadership to ensure platform investments align with organizational priorities
• Manage strategic vendor relationships, including budgets, licensing, and service-level agreements
• Clearly communicate platform roadmap, progress, risks, and outcomes to leadership

Team Growth

• Lead hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning efforts to build and scale a strong engineering organization
• Support engineers' technical and professional development through mentorship, coaching, and communities of practice
• Promote a culture centered on ownership, continuous learning, reliability, collaboration, and ongoing improvement

Skills & Qualifications

• Demonstrated people leadership experience including hiring, coaching, performance management, and team development
• Strong delivery-management experience spanning planning, execution, and risk management
• Strong technical foundation across software engineering using Go and Python, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and GitOps, AWS and Azure cloud environments, Kubernetes, observability/SRE, platform security, and test automation
• Technical depth sufficient to review code, guide architecture, and make informed engineering trade-offs
• Excellent stakeholder communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Familiarity with ITIL practices covering incident, change, and problem management is preferred
• Experience leading teams within Lean or Agile environments such as Scrum or SAFe is preferred
• Cloud certifications and previous hands-on experience as a Platform Engineer or SRE are preferred
• Working knowledge of emerging AI governance frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, or ISO/IEC 42001 is preferred

Professional Background

• Significant years of experience across platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, software engineering, or related disciplines
• Several years of experience managing, coaching, and developing engineering teams
• Strong hands-on engineering experience prior to moving into management, including coding, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud technologies
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience
• Advanced degree is a plus
• Experience delivering internal developer platforms or cloud and DevOps capabilities within a global professional services, legal, or regulated environment is preferred

Expected salary for this exempt role is $230,000 - $300,000, commensurate with experience, training, skills, qualifications, and other market factors.

Job ID: 7612