Sr. Engineering Manager, Core Services - Slack

Salesforce•Atlanta, GA

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

Slack is looking for an Engineering Manager on the Core Services engineering team. The purpose of this role is to keep Slack working seamlessly at massive scale — it's the infrastructure that keeps Slack feeling lightning fast. This person will be a steward of some of the most critical, high-throughput systems at Slack — the kind of work where doing it well means millions of users, at the world’s most important and interesting companies, never experience a hiccup. We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Our team maintains and builds performant services that include: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, Enterprise Key Management (EKM), International Data Residency (IDR), and Image Uploads, Downloads, and Proxying. We've done our job correctly when none of our users think about us, much like a vital utility. We don't typically ship new user-facing features, but rather ensure our systems are exceptionally performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable. In other words, we make Slack work seamlessly. Slack's backend services are written in Go and Java, and Slack's API is built on PHP/Hack. The Core Services Team is a team building critical services that enable Slack to scale for our largest customers. Our edge caches power the most latency-critical queries for our largest entities today, serving approximately 35% of all Slack API traffic. Our Realtime Services (RTS) power Slack's core messaging stack — running 10 services, 4 of which are mission-critical Tier 0 services — ensuring that messages, presence, and real-time events are delivered reliably at scale. We also own services that power Slack's Enterprise Key Management and International Data Residency features, enabling Slack to win and retain enterprise and government customers with strict compliance requirements (FedRAMP/NIST). We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability are the foundations of our work. We are actively building the future of edge services at Slack, so we can support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements with minimal latency.

Requirements

Led engineering teams for 5+ years building and operating high-scale, high-availability backend infrastructure or distributed systems.
Strong software engineering fundamentals with previous experience as a Senior+ backend engineer, with enough depth to be credible in architecture discussions about caching, distributed systems, observability and reliability best practices, and system design — and to build SME knowledge in a new area fast.
History of managing Tier 0 / Tier 1 services where uptime matters deeply, including owning on-call rotations, leading incident response, and driving operational improvements.
Experience with realtime messaging systems or event-driven architectures at scale — presence, message delivery, pub/sub, or similar systems where latency and reliability directly impact user experience.
Experience leading multi-quarter migration or platform evolution projects while simultaneously keeping existing systems reliable.
Managed teams through prioritization trade-offs — weighing reliability vs. feature work vs. cost vs. compliance — and can articulate those decisions to both engineers and executives.
Experience partnering with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Sales, Compliance, Security, Infrastructure) to turn business requirements into engineering plans.
Understand how to build a high-performing team culture: hiring, performance management, retention of top performers, and growing new technical leaders.
Experience managing engineers across multiple time zones, with an async rhythm that doesn't depend on overlap hours.
An understanding of how and where AI software development tooling can be deployed for maximum team impact.

Nice To Haves

Experience with the Go and/or Java programming language at scale.
Experience with AWS infrastructure, including multi-region architectures.
Experience with Kubernetes and container-based deployments.
Experience working within highly regulated environments where an understanding of FedRAMP/NIST frameworks was essential.
Experience with Enterprise Key Management, data residency, or compliance-driven infrastructure.
Managed teams responsible for Edge Caching, CDN, or API gateway systems.
Led teams through system deprecation and migration while maintaining service reliability.

Responsibilities

Owning the technical direction and roadmap across the Core Services portfolio: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, Enterprise Key Management, International Data Residency, and Image Proxying and Uploads.
Leading a multi-system migration of Flannel to Loom, our next-generation edge cache, while keeping the current systems running at full reliability for millions of users.
Driving delivery and execution while maintaining reliability as a top priority, including sprint planning, product launches, incident follow-ups, operational sustainability analyses, and building the technical case for investment with leadership.
Owning on-call operations and incident management for Tier 0 services.
Partnering cross-functionally with Product, Sales, Compliance, Security, AWS, and other infrastructure teams on dependencies, timelines, and risks.
Representing your team's work in leadership reviews, quarterly and annual planning, and executive forums.
Building and maintaining a high-trust team culture where engineers do impactful work and grow.
Managing cost and capacity for services that run at massive scale, working with finance on AWS spend trends, exec-approved budget increases, and cost-saving initiatives like the Loom migration (projected $1-2M savings).
Driving the team to adopt AI development tooling for maximum impact, while maintaining engineering rigor and quality for critical infrastructure.