Manager, Platform Engineering

Endor Labs • Palo Alto, CA

1d • $200,000 - $275,000

About The Position

We're looking for a Manager of Platform Engineering to lead and grow our small but mighty Platform Engineering team. You'll step in as a player-coach - someone who isn't afraid to get hands-on in the infrastructure, write Terraform, debug a Kubernetes issue, or triage an incident - while also building the team and the systems we'll need at the next stage of Endor Labs' growth. This role is ideal for a technical leader who thrives in a scrappy, fast-moving startup environment, can operate with ambiguity, and is excited by the challenge of building both a team and a platform from the ground up.

Requirements

• People Management Experience: You've managed engineers before - hired, onboarded, grown, and sometimes had hard conversations. You know what good looks like and can develop talent, not just direct it.
• Hands-On Platform Engineering Chops: 8+ years of SRE or Platform Engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to get technical when needed. You can move fluidly between a 1:1 and a terminal window.
• Kubernetes and Cloud Expertise: Deep, production-grade experience with Kubernetes and at least one major cloud provider (Azure, GCP, or AWS). You know the sharp edges and can debug complex multi-cluster issues without a runbook.
• Infrastructure as Code Fluency: Strong experience with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar IaC tools. You've built reusable modules, managed state at scale, and set patterns for teams to follow.
• Startup Mindset: Comfortable with ambiguity, resource constraints, and wearing multiple hats. You know the difference between the right long-term architecture and the right thing to ship this week - and when to choose each.
• Operational Rigor: You've been on-call, led incident retrospectives, and know how to build systems and processes that reduce toil over time. You care about reliability without becoming a bottleneck.
• Genuine Curiosity About Agentic AI: You are actively thinking about how AI agents change the way software gets built and operated. You do not need to have all the answers, but you should have a point of view, be energized by the ambiguity, and be ready to drive a real roadmap from it.
• Strong Communicator: Able to communicate clearly with engineers, cross-functional partners, and leadership. You document decisions, advocate for your team, and represent platform work with clarity and conviction.

Nice To Haves

• Experience Scaling a Team: You've grown an engineering team from small to mid-size, and you've learned what to standardize, what to keep flexible, and what gets harder before it gets easier.
• Security Domain Familiarity: Bonus if you've worked in or alongside a security product company. Understanding of compliance requirements (SOC 2, GDPR) and secure-by-default infrastructure patterns is a plus.
• Observability Depth: Hands-on experience with open source observability tooling - Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, Pyroscope - and a history of building dashboards and SLIs/SLOs that teams actually use.
• GitOps Experience: Hands-on with ArgoCD or Flux in production - progressive delivery, sync waves, and the real-world complexity of declarative infrastructure.
• Cost Optimization Track Record: You've reduced cloud spend meaningfully while maintaining or improving service quality. You understand FinOps isn't just a dashboard - it's an engineering discipline.

Responsibilities

• Lead and Grow the Team: Manage a team of 3 engineers today, with a clear mandate to grow. You'll hire, mentor, and develop engineers while fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement - all without losing the startup speed that makes us who we are.
• Be the Technical Anchor: Roll up your sleeves and contribute directly - whether that's reviewing infrastructure PRs, stepping in during an outage, or pairing with an engineer on a gnarly Kubernetes networking problem. You'll set the technical bar through your own work, not just directives.
• Own Platform Strategy: Define and execute the roadmap for our cloud infrastructure across Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Balance near-term reliability and operational needs with longer-term scalability investments as we grow rapidly.
• Drive Reliability and Scale: Ensure the platform that processes billions of security events daily remains highly available and performant. Establish SLOs, incident response practices, and on-call processes that scale with the team.
• Elevate Developer Experience: Partner with Backend and Product Engineering to build self-service tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and golden-path abstractions that help every engineer at Endor Labs ship faster and more safely.
• Advance Infrastructure as Code: Champion GitOps and IaC best practices across Terraform/OpenTofu deployments. Build reusable patterns and raise the bar for how we manage our entire cloud footprint.
• Collaborate Across the Company: Work closely with Security, Product, and Engineering leadership to align platform investments with business priorities. Translate technical constraints into clear tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders.
• Lead Our Agentic Engineering Transformation: Serve as the internal thought leader for how Endor Labs builds and ships software in an AI-native world. The Platform team is at the center of this shift - defining the infrastructure, tooling, and practices that let engineering teams harness AI agents effectively and safely. This is a greenfield space where you will set the direction, build conviction across the company, and make it real.
• Build for the Future: Make architectural decisions today that won't box us in tomorrow. Think ahead to 10x growth, but pragmatically sequence the work so we keep shipping.

Benefits

• Compensation: For candidates who receive an offer at the posted level, the base salary is expected to be between $200,000 - $275,000. This may include incentives/variable compensations such as commissions, stock options and/or bonuses, depending on the position.
• Final compensation will vary based on seniority and relevance of experience, location, and position requirements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees