Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering (Remote)

ezCater is investing in a next-generation, composable platform that powers future product experiences across the organization. This platform is API-first, headless, and designed to enable teams to build and evolve product capabilities quickly, safely, and at scale.
As Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering, you will lead the teams responsible for the foundation that every engineering team builds on: infrastructure, developer experience, shared libraries, CI/CD, observability, and governance. You will own delivery across developer experience, core platform tooling, and platform infrastructure -- ensuring that domain teams building on the platform have an opinionated, supported path that lets them focus on their domain instead of infrastructure decisions.
This is a hands-on engineering management role. You are close to the work -- reviewing technical designs, pairing with engineers on hard problems, and making informed tradeoff calls across infrastructure, tooling, and developer experience. You came up through engineering, you understand distributed systems and cloud-native infrastructure, and you bring that judgment to every decision about what to build, how to build it, and in what order.

What You’ll Own:

• Delivery across platform engineering: developer experience, core platform tooling (shared libraries, event streaming clients, auth middleware), and platform infrastructure (compute clusters, networking, infrastructure-as-code, observability)
• The opinionated path for building and operating services: language, frameworks, CI/CD, deployment, observability, and governance -- the defaults that come with support out of the box
• Milestone delivery for the platform foundation on a timeline that unblocks domain teams building search, identity, payments, and other capabilities
• Day-to-day engineering management: hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers across the platform teams
• Cross-team coordination: when domain teams need something from the platform, you own prioritization and delivery

What Your Teams Will Build:

• A fresh compute cluster for new platform services, with namespace isolation, modern autoscaling, and clean networking
• CI/CD pipelines (build, test, contract validation, GitOps deployment) that are the single supported path for all new services
• A service template that gives domain teams a working, observable, deployable service in minutes
• Shared libraries and building blocks: event streaming clients, HTTP clients, auth middleware, instrumentation
• Infrastructure modules: reusable, versioned modules for databases, event streaming topics, caching, secrets -- provisioned via infrastructure-as-code
• An observability stack (APM, logging, tracing, alerting) that ships by default with every service.

What Success Looks Like (12-18 Months):

• Domain teams can scaffold, build, deploy, and observe a new service using the platform path without making infrastructure decisions or filing tickets
• The platform foundation is delivered on the milestone timeline, unblocking the first wave of domain services
• Every new service is deployed through the same CI/CD pipeline with consistent observability and operational standards
• Infrastructure provisioning is self-service via versioned modules -- no manual work or ad-hoc configuration
• The platform teams are well-staffed, well-organized, and operating with clear ownership
• Engineering teams view the platform path as the easiest way to ship -- not a constraint to work around.

How You'll Lead:

• Stay close to the technical work: review designs, participate in architecture discussions, and maintain the judgment to evaluate proposals and recognize when something needs a different approach
• Manage and develop engineers directly, with the potential to grow into managing team leads as the organization scales
• Prioritize ruthlessly: the platform backlog will always be larger than the team. Sequence work so that domain teams are never blocked on capabilities they need.
• Drive execution with clear milestones, deliverables, and accountability -- without micromanaging how engineers do their work
• Partner with domain engineering leaders to understand their needs and ensure the platform meets them
• Build a culture of clear ownership, operational excellence, and developer empathy

What You Have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in engineering management or technical team leadership
• A strong technical foundation: you have built and operated distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, or platform tooling. You can evaluate a cluster architecture, a CI/CD pipeline design, or a shared library API with real depth.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes/EKS, infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, service networking)
• Experience establishing engineering standards: CI/CD pipelines, service templates, observability defaults, deployment patterns
• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers
• Strong communication skills: you can translate between infrastructure complexity and team priorities, and represent the platform in cross-team discussions
• A pragmatic, service-oriented mindset: you understand that the platform team's success is measured by how effectively other teams can build on it

Role Scope & Focus:

• This is an engineering management role with strong technical expectations. You manage engineers directly and are accountable for the technical quality and delivery of the platform.
• You report to the VP of Engineering and partner closely on platform strategy, milestone planning, and team structure
• You partner with domain engineering leaders (search, identity, commerce, menus) to ensure the platform meets their needs without becoming a bottleneck
• You do not own application-level domain services. You own the foundation they build on.
• As the platform organization grows, this role has a clear path to Director scope

The platform is the foundation for a multi-year re-architecture of ezCater's technology stack. Every domain team depends on the platform to provide the infrastructure, tooling, and standards that let them focus on their domain. This role ensures that the foundation is solid, opinionated, and delivered on time. Your work directly determines how fast the organization can move.

The national total targetcash compensation range for this position, including base salary and bonus target, is $218,000 - $280,000 annually.*

*Please note: Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise and region & may vary from the amount above. This range does not represent additional compensation benefits (such as equity, 401K or medical, dental or vision insurance).