Senior Engineering Manager, Thinkific

• Has 10+ years of infrastructure, platform engineering, or software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams
• Possesses extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), AWS infrastructure (EKS, RDS, IAM, ALB, S3) and Terraform-based infrastructure as code
• Demonstrates strong understanding and practical experience with observability tools (New Relic) and can effectively leverage them for reliability and performance insights
• Is experienced in leveraging structured frameworks like SPACE and DORA to measure and improve Developer Experience, productivity and operational outcomes
• Has significant experience leading teams responsible for managing large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure that supports diverse technical stacks
• Is an effective communicator, collaborator and strategic thinker, able to clearly articulate platform vision to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Brings a deep sense of ownership, accountability and passion for reliability and developer productivity

Desirable

• Are you a seasoned engineering leader passionate about platform reliability, developer experience, and operational excellence? We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager | Platform to lead our talented Platform team at Thinkific
• As the Senior Engineering Manager, Platform, you’ll drive the technical vision, strategy and execution for the infrastructure and architecture powering thousands of online course creators worldwide. You’ll lead and grow a team focused on Kubernetes-based infrastructure, AWS cloud services, reliability engineering, observability and developer experience enabling Thinkific’s products to scale effectively and securely
• In this role, you’ll shape our technical direction, drive improvements in reliability and performance and build a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence. You will lead a team of senior and staff engineers and work closely with product management and senior leadership to deliver meaningful outcomes
• Your goal is to design and evolve the architecture and build, scale and optimize a reliable, secure, and developer-friendly platform that supports rapid product innovation and high availability
• Own the platform engineering roadmap, driving strategic initiatives to ensure our Kubernetes and AWS-based infrastructure meets high standards for reliability, security, and scalability. Help define our long term technical direction to bring clarity and alignment across our engineering organization
• Lead and mentor engineers and Staff SREs, helping them manage technical domains effectively, raise the technical bar and enhance overall team capabilities
• Define, track, and improve Developer Experience (DevEx), using metrics frameworks such as CORE4, SPACE and DORA, ensuring engineering teams are productive, efficient, and satisfied
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (engineering, product management, security) to design robust CI/CD pipelines, automate operations and implement secure-by-default practices
• Cultivate a culture of reliability and observability, championing proactive incident management, blameless postmortems and continuous learning
• Set and track meaningful SLOs/SLIs, ensuring that observability practices provide deep insights into infrastructure performance and reliability
• Communicate clearly and proactively, maintaining alignment between platform initiatives and broader company strategy