Senior Engineering Manager, Upside
$210-260k
+ 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
$210-260k
+ 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
- Have 5+ years of engineering management experience, ideally across platform, data, or infrastructure domains
- Thrive in environments where you’re asked to scale teams, elevate systems, and solve ambiguity in equal measure
- Have familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, dbt), and orchestration tools (e.g., Dagster, Airflow)
- Have hands-on experience or deep familiarity with MLOps practices, such as model versioning, deployment, monitoring, and reproducibility
- Value clarity over consensus and help teams stay aligned through high-change, high-growth conditions
- Are interested in integrating generative AI into team workflows and engineering processes to improve delivery speed, quality, and developer productivity, and foster continuous improvement across the development lifecycle
What the job involves
- As engineering leaders at Upside, we strive to gather the right information from those around us and take the right calculated risks
- In doing so, we hope to help teams quickly make key decisions that will ship high quality software with the most delightful experience possible to our users
- We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Infrastructure and Data Platform teams, two foundational groups responsible for Upside’s core platforms
- These teams provide the cloud, data, and analytics capabilities that power every application, insight, and decision across the company
- This leader will combine technical competence with people-first leadership to drive operational excellence, foster growth, and scale the systems that underpin our product and internal platforms
- This role will also help close a strategic gap in our technical organization by guiding the evolution of MLOps practices that support data science and machine learning innovation
- Create a safe, collaborative team environment. You name problems and invite open discussion, which motivates your team to do their best work
- Operate with a first-team mindset. You lean in when important areas need help, regardless of whether it's “your” domain, and prioritize the success of the whole organization
- Raise the bar. You identify and influence improvements in quality, performance, speed of execution, and engineering standards
- Grow talent. You coach your engineers, recognize their achievements, and help them develop skills that will benefit them and Upside for years to come
- Set clarity and empower autonomy. You ensure expectations and direction are clearly articulated so that individuals and teams can operate with independence, confidence, and creativity
- Champion system-level quality by identifying and addressing gaps in reliability, scalability, security, and performance across infrastructure and analytics systems
- Ensure the cloud platform is secure, cost-efficient, and production-ready, and that the data stack enables self-service, repeatable, and trusted workflows
- Shape technical direction across DevOps, DataOps, and MLOps domains, and drive strategic upgrades such as orchestrator migrations, cloud modernization, and analytics workflow enablement
- Oversee large-scale programs that span infrastructure, data, and analytics domains, aligning execution with business priorities and cross-team dependencies
- Establish and monitor key operational metrics (e.g., platform availability, cost per transaction, data pipeline reliability, MLOps readiness)
- Act as the primary point of contact for internal partners (e.g. Product, Product Engineering, Security, Data Science, and Retail Go To Market), ensuring platform capabilities support evolving business needs
- Represent the infrastructure and analytics engineering teams in cross-functional planning, technical councils, and long-term roadmap discussions
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.
Having secured investments in a 2022 round of equity funding, Upside expanded into mobile payments, growing its value to over $1.5 billion. Upside is moving to scale its operations by hiring additional talent and forming new partnerships with brands and businesses. As growing inflation impacts the cost of living, Upside's product will likely be increasingly appreciated by consumers and 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
(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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