Senior Engineering Manager, Edge Delivery

Fastly•San Francisco, NY

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

Fastly is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead its Edge Delivery team, which owns the customized Varnish engine at the core of Fastly’s global platform. The team builds and operates the engine, VCL compiler, and edge caching systems, and works on initiatives including next-generation split storage architectures, VCL language evolution, and origin connectivity. The role manages 15 senior engineers and works alongside an engineering director who focuses on strategy and executive alignment. The manager will establish sustainable team structures, support regular project execution, and focus on direct people management, including feedback, career growth, and retention. The role partners with product managers and the director to turn high-level roadmaps into clear engineering projects, unblocks technical issues, improves workflows, and maintains platform uptime and performance. It also participates in incident response and keeps the team focused on cache hit ratio, throughput, memory efficiency, and stability under high load. The position requires availability during core business hours, with occasional nights and weekends as necessary to support on-call coverage. Preferred locations are New York, NY; Denver, CO; and San Francisco, CA. Fastly primarily uses a hybrid model, with a strong preference for hybrid candidates near a local office, but may consider remote candidates within the United States. Travel may be required as appropriate for the role or at the manager’s request.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience managing infrastructure or systems engineering teams, including experience leading groups of 10 or more engineers or establishing tech lead structures.
At least 10 years of related engineering experience in low-latency systems, networking, CDNs, or C/C++/Rust environments.
Sufficient technical depth to review engineering proposals and prioritize technical debt.
Enthusiasm for developing senior engineers, building balanced team workflows, and measuring success by team output and health.
Experience building collaborative, accountable teams and providing clear, honest, constructive feedback.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Experience managing distributed teams and turning complex goals into clear tasks.
A practical approach to problem-solving and a preference for automation over manual work.
Availability during core business hours, with occasional nights and weekends as necessary for on-call coverage.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Varnish or high-throughput HTTP proxy architectures such as Envoy, Nginx, or Apache Traffic Server.
Strong understanding of HTTP caching mechanics and protocols, including headers, stale-while-revalidate, conditional requests, and object lifecycles.
Experience with globally distributed edge networks, CDNs, or large-scale traffic management systems.

Responsibilities

Manage a distributed team working on Varnish internals and developing new VCL features.
Organize the team into sustainable structures that enable effective, scalable operations.
Run regular one-on-ones, provide feedback, support career growth, and help retain technical talent.
Partner with product managers and the engineering director to translate high-level roadmaps into clear engineering projects.
Protect engineers from unnecessary project churn.
Unblock technical issues, refine daily workflows, and maintain high standards for platform uptime and performance.
Participate in incident response by helping triage outages, asking technical questions, and supporting the team under pressure.
Keep the team focused on cache hit ratio, throughput, memory efficiency, and system stability under high load.