Manager of Infrastructure Engineering, Upside
$185-215k
+ Equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
Mobile reward application for retail spending
Be an early applicant
Mobile reward application for retail spending
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$185-215k
+ Equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
To advance the economic power of people living and working in the real world.
Role
Who you are
- You aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo when it makes the team and business better. You learn from those around you while utilizing data to advocate for informed change
- You thrive at the intersection of systems and storytelling, not only building robust solutions but also communicating their purpose, impact and rationale, so teams can experiment, iterate, and act confidently
- You care about building resilient systems that scale. You bring a mindset of continuous improvement, and know when to invest in observability, automation, or new infrastructure to reduce toil and improve outcomes for the team and end users
- You believe that pulling quality upstream starts with engineering. You champion best practices, encourage early testing and validation, and work closely with peers to build a culture of quality from the ground up
- Have 3+ years of experience managing infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering teams, and at least 3+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production systems in the cloud
- Are comfortable designing and reviewing solutions in AWS, including networking, container orchestration, storage, and IAM, and can make pragmatic tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and cost
- Are eager to integrate generative AI into engineering workflows to improve delivery speed, quality, and developer experience (e.g., runbooks, incident analysis, platform automation)
- Have experience with modern DevOps practices and tooling (e.g., Terraform or other IaC, CI/CD systems, observability stacks, incident management) and know when to invest in automation and standardization to reduce toil
- Thrive in environments where you’re asked to elevate systems, and bring clarity to ambiguity, especially in high-growth, high-change conditions
- Communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences, and can translate complex infrastructure and reliability tradeoffs into clear roadmaps and investments, advocating for the platform in a way that balances speed, quality, and long-term business value
What the job involves
- We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Infrastructure team, the group responsible for Upside’s core cloud platform, networking, security, and foundational services
- This team provides the compute, storage, networking, observability, and CI/CD capabilities that power every application and data product at Upside
- You’ll combine deep infrastructure experience with people-first leadership to drive reliability, security, and scalability across our platforms, while creating an environment where engineers can do the best work of their careers
- As an engineering leader at Upside, you gather the right information from those around you and take thoughtful risks so teams can ship high-quality, reliable software quickly
- Lead with platform and company outcomes over local optimization. You lean in wherever critical infrastructure risk or opportunity exists, regardless of org boundaries, and prioritize the success of the broader platform and product ecosystem
- Create a safe, collaborative team environment. You name problems, invite open discussion, and help your team learn from incidents and change without blame
- Raise the bar. You identify and influence improvements in reliability, performance, security, and engineering standards across services and environments
- Provide clarity and empower autonomy. You ensure expectations, SLAs, and guardrails are clear so teams can move quickly and independently on a stable platform
- Ensure our AWS environments are secure, cost-efficient, and production-ready, with strong foundations in IAM, networking, secrets management, encryption, and compliance-aware controls
- Lead the evolution of our CI/CD, observability, and platform tooling,making it easier and safer for product and data teams to ship, monitor, and operate services independently, and improving overall developer experience
- Drive operational excellence across reliability, scalability, and performance, including capacity planning, incident management, on-call health, and post-incident learning culture
- Define and track key platform health and cost metrics, such as availability, latency, error budgets, infrastructure cost per transaction, and change failure rates, using these insights to guide prioritization and continuous improvement
- Partner closely with Security, Data Platform, and Product Engineering teams to ensure infrastructure decisions enable reliable experimentation, user-centric product development, and scalable data and ML systems
- Oversee large-scale programs that span multiple teams, such as cloud modernization, multi-region or cell-based architecture, and foundational security or resilience upgrades
- Represent Infrastructure in cross-functional planning and technical forums, translating platform risks and opportunities into clear business tradeoffs and decisions
- We want our engineering leaders to be able to make thoughtful, impactful technical decisions while also having the space to coach their engineers and support their growth
- We ask our managers to focus on a team of around 8 direct reports, while our more senior managers may operate across two teams. The staffing for these reports is always split - we see incredible value from a mix of full-time and contract staff
Our take
Loyalty systems, vouchers, and other special offers have a proven track record at winning over new customers for businesses. However, customers can be reluctant to sign up due to the sheer number of these schemes. Upside exists to unify these loyalty schemes with a single flexible reward app.
While retail reward platforms are nothing new, Upside functions more like a marketplace, linking participating businesses to potential customers. It also rewards customers with cash back on eligible purchases, a more flexible reward than is traditional in loyalty schemes.
With over 50,000 businesses enrolled and 30 million app users, Upside has grown into a major player in this sector. The company is well-funded and ever-expanding its offering, with a product that is increasingly appreciated by consumers in an expensive world, as well as the businesses who depend on their custom.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
24% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Apr 2022
$65m
SERIES D
Total funding: $65m
Company benefits
- Health and Wellness - We’re happy to provide our team members with generous health, vision, and dental insurance options
- Lunch - We cover the cost of lunch everyday for team members onsite to enhance our team building and encourage collaboration. Plus local restaurants appreciate it!
- Stock Options - Our team’s success is our company’s success, and we should all have a stake in that. We’re glad to offer our team members valuable stock options
- Unlimited PTO - Yes, you read that right. When you need time off, we’ve got you covered
Company HQ
Dupont Circle, Washington, DC
Leadership
Alex Kinnier
(CEO & Co-Founder)Experience as Group Product Manager for Google from 2005 to 2008. Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering for Opower from 2012 to 2015.
Wayne Lin
(CPO & Co-Founder)Experience as Product Manager for Google from 2005 to 2010. Vice President of Product Management & Analytics for Opower from 2010 to 2015.
Rick McPhee
(Co-Founder)Experience as Vice President of Engineering for HP's Fortify Software from 2008 to 2012. Senior Vice President of Engineering for Opower from 2012 to 2015.
Joanna Kochaniak
(Engineer & Co-Founder)Experience as Programmer Analyst for the Institute for Physical Sciences from 2007 to 2010. Lead Software Engineer for Opower from 2010 to 2015.
Jan Rubio
(Designer & Co-Founder)Experience as Research Assistant for George Washington University from 2009 to 2011. Senior Software Engineer for Opower from 2011 to 2016.
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