Engineering Manager, Platform

Airbyte is looking for an Engineering Manager, Platform to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure, tooling, and engineering systems that power Airbyte Cloud, Airbyte Flex, and Airbyte Agents.

As an Engineering Manager on the Platform team, you'll lead the engineers responsible for cloud infrastructure, deployment systems, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and the internal tooling that powers engineering velocity across the company. Your work directly shapes both how fast engineers ship and how customers experience Airbyte. This isn't a keep-the-lights-on role. You'll make real tradeoffs between engineering velocity, customer-facing reliability, and long-term architecture every week, and you'll help define how AI transforms the way we build and operate software.

This role combines people leadership, technical strategy, operational excellence, and platform thinking. You'll help define how engineering works at Airbyte - not just what we build.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Platform Engineers, Fullstack Engineers, and SREs. Recruit engineers who understand that infrastructure decisions are product decisions.

- Own the reliability and operational health of Airbyte's production systems.

- Define the roadmap for Airbyte's platform: infrastructure, CI/CD, deployment automation, observability, internal tooling, and the product surfaces built on top of them.

- Invest in and drive adoption of AI-powered workflows for debugging, release validation, infrastructure management, and developer productivity, moving past experimentation into real operational leverage.

- Lead incident response, run blameless postmortems, and ensure systemic fixes follow every outage. Continuously reduce operational toil through automation.

- Build leverage: a week-long task this year should take ten minutes next year.

SUCCESS METRICS:

- Engineers deploy with confidence and ship faster quarter over quarter.

- Platform reliability improves as measured by customer-facing SLAs, not just internal dashboards.

- Operational toil decreases through automation, not heroics.

- Incidents are detected faster, resolved faster, and the same failure doesn't happen twice.

- Your team is engaged, growing, and building careers they're proud of.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:

- 5+ years of software engineering experience, 2+ years managing engineering teams.

- Experience leading Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, SRE, or Developer Productivity organizations.

- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and distributed systems.

- Experience operating production systems at scale.

- You think about platform work in terms of customer impact, not just engineering elegance.

- You've navigated the tension between paying down tech debt and shipping product, and you can articulate how you made those calls.

- Excellent communication skills. You can translate platform strategy into language that product, design, and business leaders understand.

- You have an insatiable desire to ship.

NICE TO HAVE:

- Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows or agentic software development.

- Experience building internal developer platforms.

- Familiarity with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and cloud-native infrastructure.

- Experience with data infrastructure, ETL/ELT, or large-scale distributed systems.

- Experience contributing to open-source engineering organizations.

- Familiarity with Airbyte, connector ecosystems, or developer tooling platforms.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS:

Platform Engineering is the force multiplier for every engineering team at Airbyte.

Your mission is to build the systems, tooling, and infrastructure that enable engineers to move faster while making our platform more reliable, secure, and scalable. Success means every deployment becomes safer, every incident becomes easier to resolve, every engineer becomes more productive, and AI becomes a natural part of how software is built.

The best platform teams are invisible—they make everyone else dramatically more effective. That's the team you'll build.

LOCATION:

- Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco, CA