Senior Engineering Manager, API Catalog

Postman•Cupertino, CA

6h•$280,000 - $320,000•Onsite

About The Position

Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity A large enterprise runs hundreds of services across multiple cloud accounts, multiple gateways, several repository hosts, and a mix of cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Nobody can produce a complete list. Postman's API Catalog is the system of record that can: it connects to where APIs actually live, brings them into a single inventory, and gives platform teams the means to govern them — ownership, environments, specification compliance, and evidence that release gates were met. What's ahead is: turning a product that works into the system of record that a large platform organization standardizes on company-wide. That means carrying estates an order of magnitude larger than today's, reaching every environment and every gateway an enterprise actually runs, and becoming the control plane through which API governance happens rather than one more inventory somebody has to maintain. We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own the engineering behind it. You'll lead a small, senior, US-based team, and you'll spend a meaningful share of your time landing work that crosses team boundaries — because most of what this roadmap needs, this team does not build alone.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering teams.
Depth you can prove on a hard technical problem you personally solved — a system you designed and debugged yourself, not a project you oversaw. We will ask you to go deep on this.
Experience taking a validated product from 1→10 — scaling something that already had customers into something a large organization standardizes on. This is not a 0→1 role; the interesting problems here are breadth, scale, and trust rather than product discovery.
Production ownership of an enterprise integration surface at breadth — many third-party providers, each with its own authentication, rate limits, permission model, and cloud-versus-self-hosted differences. You've felt the maintenance cost of the tenth connector.
Demonstrated ability to ship work that depends on teams you don't manage, in an organization where those teams have their own roadmaps.
Experience leading a senior-heavy team, where the job was elevating strong engineers rather than directing junior ones.
Multi-tenant enterprise SaaS, including customers with on-prem or self-managed infrastructure and real compliance requirements.
Full lifecycle ownership from design through production support.
Clear, economical communication with engineers, executives, and customers. You'll be in front of all three.

Nice To Haves

API gateway technologies and cloud provider control-plane APIs (AWS, GCP, Azure), plus Kubernetes.
CI/CD systems and developer workflow tooling — you understand what it takes for a team to accept a new gate in their pipeline.
Analytical datastores supporting customer-facing reporting (ClickHouse or similar), including the operational reality of them.
Event-driven and asynchronous API technologies, particularly Kafka.
Governance, audit, or compliance reporting for enterprise buyers.

Responsibilities

Lead a senior team
Manage, coach, and grow a team of experienced engineers, some of whom hold institutional knowledge that predates you. The work is surfacing gaps and raising the bar, then letting senior engineers own the fix.
Hire deliberately as the team grows, and set a clear technical bar in the process.
Set explicit goals, give direct feedback, and keep the team's work legible to the rest of the organization.
Reduce single-owner concentration on critical systems. Spread context deliberately rather than letting it pool in one person.
Land work that crosses team boundaries
This deserves its own section because it is the largest determinant of whether this role succeeds.
Most of what the catalog ships depends on teams you don't manage — specification tooling, the API client, the integrations and ecosystem teams that own provider connectivity, and shared platform services. You'll need to secure commitments, sequence around other teams' plans, and unblock reviews without escalating every time.
Own the seams: define the contracts between the catalog and its dependencies clearly enough that both sides can move independently.
Be honest and early about which commitments are genuinely at the mercy of another team's roadmap, and bring options rather than only the blocker.
Own the technical direction
Drive architecture and execution across ingestion, federation, the service model, and the reporting and deployment data layers, with correctness, multi-tenant isolation, and cost-per-tenant as design constraints rather than afterthoughts.
Set the quality bar for reporting accuracy and build the measurement to know whether you're meeting it. A number a customer can't reconcile is worse than no number.
Treat on-prem and self-managed deployments as a first-class variant of every connector, not a port.
Hold the line on engineering fundamentals — design review, testing, safe staged rollout, and instrumentation of the team's own services.
Own delivery
Own the API Catalog engineering roadmap and its tradeoffs, balancing enterprise commitments, connector breadth, and debt in systems that predate the current product direction.
Break large initiatives into milestones that ship incrementally and can be evaluated on the way. Several of this team's initiatives will mature beyond a single quarter; plan accordingly.
Own production reliability and the support burden, and treat recurring toil as a design problem rather than a staffing one.