Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Overview

Job Description

Responsibilities

• - Directly manage a team growing to 5–7 senior engineers — 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, career development, performance management — and build the team itself: you'll drive recruiting for several of your own hires in your first year and own their onboarding
• - Own your domain’s technical outcomes: delivery, reliability, and the consequences of its big technical bets – in close partnership with senior and staff engineers and your product counterpart
• - Partner with product to balance feature development with tech debt drawdown, infrastructure investments, and other efforts to improve velocity and drive compounding progress
• - Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
• - Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
• - Represent your team with stakeholders and leadership: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
• - Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck

Required Skills

• - Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity
• - 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles
• - 8+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)
• - Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth
• - Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
• - Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact
• - Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you’re excited by this, rather than daunted by it

Benefits

• - Base Salary: $181,130 (US)
• - Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$27,170, with potential for upside)
• - Estimated Total Compensation at Target: $208,300+
• - Annual Benefits Stipend: $21,393 (US)
• - Base Salary: £124,370 (UK)
• - Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~£18,656, with potential for upside)
• - Estimated Total Compensation at Target: £143,026+
• - Annual Benefits Stipend: £2,760 (UK)
• - Base Salary: $112,350 (Kenya)
• - Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$16,853, with potential for upside)
• - Estimated Total Compensation at Target: $129,203+
• - Annual Benefits Stipend: $8,453 (Kenya)