Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure & Data Engineering

Ignite Reading

5d•$210,000 - $220,000•Remote

About The Position

Ignite Reading is a mission-driven public benefit corporation dedicated to solving America's reading crisis by providing one-to-one virtual tutoring. They use Science of Reading-based instruction to help students, particularly those struggling with foundational reading skills, achieve rapid progress. The company values diversity, equity, and inclusion, and seeks candidates with lived experience in these areas. The Senior Platform Engineering Manager, Infrastructure & Data Engineering will lead the DevOps and Data Engineering teams, responsible for the cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and data platform that support the entire engineering and analytics organization. This player-coach role involves managing and growing engineers, setting technical direction, reviewing designs, shaping architecture, and owning the security compliance program (SOC2 audit and penetration test). The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in either cloud infrastructure/DevOps or modern data engineering, with working fluency in the other, and experience serving multiple internal customers. AI coding proficiency is also a key aspect of this role, including coaching teams on AI-assisted development and ensuring the quality and security of AI-generated outputs.

Requirements

8+ years in software, infrastructure, or data engineering, including 2+ years directly managing engineers (not solely projects or tech leadership).
Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one of our two domains: cloud infrastructure/DevOps (AWS, IaC, CI/CD, containerization, observability) or modern data engineering (orchestration, warehousing, pipelines-as-code, data quality).
Working fluency in the other domain — able to review designs, guide priorities, and support senior engineers credibly.
Experience running a team that serves multiple internal customers, with a track record of transparent prioritization across competing demands.
Familiarity with security and compliance standards such as SOC2, and comfort owning a compliance program end-to-end (coordination and program management — not security engineering).
Experience developing senior engineers into technical leads and building team resilience (documentation, on-call health, single point of failure reduction).
Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, data, and business stakeholders.
Strategic thinker with the ability to balance short-term objectives with long-term goals.
Ability to be self-managing and flexible while working in a remote environment.
Demonstrated experience using AI coding assistants as a regular part of your development workflow.
Ability to effectively validate AI outputs and identify when AI suggestions should be modified or rejected.
Understanding of when AI tools add value versus when traditional approaches are more appropriate.
Willingness to learn, adapt to, and coach others on new AI development tools and practices.

Responsibilities

Lead, manage, and grow two teams: DevOps (cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, incident response) and Data Engineering (pipelines, warehouse, data platform).
Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and career development for six engineers, including developing technical leads within each team.
Set and drive a unified platform roadmap in partnership with the Director of Engineering and VP of Data, balancing infrastructure investment, data platform direction, and technical debt against delivery needs.
Ensure reliable, scalable, secure cloud infrastructure on AWS and smooth, efficient deployment pipelines for the entire engineering organization.
Ensure the data platform serves both of its customers well — product engineering and our analytics/data science team — with clear intake, prioritization, and data quality standards.
Oversee system monitoring, alerting, on-call, and incident response to maintain high availability and performance.
Own the annual SOC2 audit cycle and annual penetration test: planning, evidence collection, vendor and auditor coordination, and remediation tracking.
Collaborate with development teams to integrate DevOps and data best practices into the software development lifecycle.
Contribute technically — writing and collaborating on technical specifications, reviewing designs, and guiding architectural decisions across both teams.
Model effective use of AI coding and analysis tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) in your own technical work.
Coach both teams on AI-assisted development practices; identify and remove barriers to adoption.
Ensure AI-generated code and configuration are validated to meet quality, security, and architecture standards — especially critical in infrastructure and data pipeline contexts.
Track and share team-level AI adoption progress, wins, and learnings across the engineering organization.

Benefits

Employee Stock Options
Medical, Dental, and Vision plans (80% employee coverage, 70% dependent coverage)
Short-term Disability (100% employer paid)
401(k) retirement plans with company contribution
12-weeks paid parental leave
Unlimited vacation days
12 paid holidays
Technology Stipend
Wellness Stipend
Voluntary Life Insurance
Professional Development Stipend