Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

Forma•, CA

1d•Remote

About The Position

As Senior Manager on the Platform side at Forma, you'll lead the backend team responsible for the core systems that power our entire benefits platform. Your team owns the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend systems that every product and customer-facing team builds on. Under your leadership, the team will drive end-to-end ownership of these services from architecture through deployment and operational excellence. You'll work closely with Engineering leadership, Product Management, Security, Customer Operations and other engineering teams to ensure our platform can scale reliably as we grow. You'll also shape how the team builds, not just what it builds — AI-assisted development is changing the volume and shape of code flowing into our systems, and Platform owns the guardrails that keep that change safe.

Requirements

5+ years of experience directly managing software engineers, including experience managing a platform, infrastructure, or backend systems team.
10+ years of experience developing backend software applications, with deep expertise in distributed systems, APIs, and service-oriented architecture.
Proven track record of building and scaling large-scale, complex distributed systems in a production environment.
Experience owning platform reliability — SLAs/SLOs, incident management, observability, and on-call practices.
Experience developing engineering talent and helping them achieve their personal and professional goals through hiring, coaching, and performance management.
Ability to foster a collaborative environment through strong partnerships with Product, Security, and other Engineering teams.
Proven success driving technical strategy and innovation in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.
Hands-on experience building with AI-assisted development tools, and a clear point of view on where they help, where they don't, and how to hold quality and security standards as output scales.

Nice To Haves

Fintech experience would be a plus.

Responsibilities

Own the product strategy and roadmap for backend platform services, balancing scalability, reliability, security, with business outcomes across the org.
Translate platform strategy into a practical execution plan with quarterly OKRs, and hold the team accountable to delivery.
Champion engineering excellence — driving best practices in system design, code quality, testing, and operational readiness across services, including an explicit bar for how AI-assisted code is specified, reviewed, and verified before it reaches production.
Partner cross-functionally with other engineering teams to define platform APIs, shared services, and infrastructure that support company-wide product velocity.
Manage and grow a team of backend engineers, providing performance feedback, hiring, and fostering a diverse, collaborative, and inclusive team culture.
Build trust and a strong engineering culture, coaching engineers toward technical and career growth, including deliberate investment in the skills AI doesn't replace: problem framing, debugging from first principles, and architectural judgment.
Own the operational model for platform reliability: uptime, incident response, on-call processes, and postmortems, ensuring the platform meets the performance and availability bar the business needs.
Develop and track engineering and platform health metrics to drive continuous improvement toward world-class enterprise infrastructure.
Set up processes to handle ad hoc infrastructure and support needs without disrupting the team's execution cadence.