Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Chipotle•Columbus, OH

2d•$130,000 - $193,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Manager, Platform Engineering leads the function responsible for Chipotle’s core infrastructure platforms and reports to the Director of IT Infrastructure. In this role, you are responsible for building and driving the strategic roadmap, cross-team dependencies, and alignment with enterprise strategy. You oversee the design, implementation, and operation of a secure and scalable technology platform that supports our restaurants and enterprise systems. You are accountable for platform reliability, scalability, and optimization across your scope. You will translate strategic objectives (such as resiliency, reliability, automation and cost optimization) into team projects and priorities, ensuring our platform services (Azure cloud, on-prem servers, containers, etc.) are robust and future-ready. This senior manager balances daily operational excellence with forward-looking improvements, guiding the Platform Engineering function to deliver on Chipotle’s modernization and growth initiatives through innovation and best practices.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree (BA/BS) in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline preferred.
Master’s Degree in a relevant field (e.g. Information Technology Management) or advanced certifications in cloud/infrastructure (AWS/Azure, etc.) preferred.
10+ years of technical experience and 4+ years of management experience.
Extensive technical expertise in infrastructure and cloud services, complemented by leadership experience in driving large-scale platform initiatives (e.g. cloud migrations, data center consolidations, or major architectural redesigns).
You can dive deep enough to guide and challenge your engineers, while keeping a strategic view of platform evolution.
Strategic planning and execution skills – you’ve translated business and IT strategy into a clear infrastructure roadmap and delivered results (higher reliability, improved performance, cost savings, etc.) through well-managed projects and agile iteration.
Strong people management and team-building ability: adept at recruiting top talent, cultivating a culture of innovation and accountability, and mentoring engineers across all levels.
You actively promote continuous learning (e.g. via the Infrastructure Academy and certifications) to keep the team’s skills current.
Excellent stakeholder management and communication – capable of articulating complex technical concepts (like cloud architecture, DevOps improvements, or disaster recovery plans) in business terms for senior leadership and ensuring alignment and buy-in for key decisions.
You also maintain close collaboration with peer managers in Security, Apps, and Data to ensure platform initiatives support broader company goals.
Proven ability to manage vendor relationships and negotiate contracts for platform technologies.
Experience in risk management, governance frameworks, and compliance for enterprise platforms.
Strong executive presence with the ability to deliver executive level reporting and presentations.
Results-driven mindset with emphasis on operational excellence and innovation: you use data and KPIs (uptime, MTTR, cost, etc.) to guide decisions, enforce rigorous operational standards, and encourage adoption of new technologies (automation, AI, etc.) to continuously modernize Chipotle’s infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Manage the Platform Engineering function, setting clear goals and work plans for initiatives like cloud infrastructure builds, environment automation, and performance tuning.
Directly manage the team of engineers and prioritize the team’s efforts to align with Chipotle’s infrastructure roadmap and ensure on-time, quality delivery of projects.
Make strategic decisions on platform architecture, technology direction, multi-year roadmap, and tactical decisions on teamwork prioritization, sprint planning, and technical trade-offs.
Co-represent Infrastructure as part of enterprise architecture review board and other decision forums.
Influence strategy and cross-departmental initiatives.
Solves enterprise-scale, multi-domain problems involving platform strategy, cross-IT dependencies, business impact trade-offs, and long-term technology evolution.
Ensure the reliability and scalability of Chipotle’s core platforms: oversee proactive maintenance (patch management, backups, capacity planning), implementation of high-availability and disaster recovery strategies, and rapid restoration of service when incidents occur.
Set and track KPIs for platform uptime, system performance, and cloud costs, taking corrective action as needed to meet targets.
Accountable for overall Platform Engineering function outcomes: platform reliability and uptime, defining SLA's, cloud cost management and optimization, platform security posture and compliance, delivery of strategic roadmap initiatives, team capability and talent development, and alignment with Infrastructure and business objectives.
Identifies, assesses, and mitigates platform-related risks; Maintains risk register and escalates appropriately.
Establishes and enforces platform governance frameworks in alignment with Chipotle's overall governance strategies and policies.
Provides technical leadership for Platform Engineering: sets direction, conducts design reviews for critical initiatives, and serves as escalation point for complex technical issues.
Works closely with Lead Engineers to translate technical vision into execution.
Maintains deep technical credibility while balancing leadership responsibilities.
Champions function-level innovation and transformation: platform modernization roadmap and emerging technology adoption.
Also drives team-level continuous improvement by working directly with Lead Engineers on automation, technical debt reduction and process optimization.
Balances innovation with risk and business value.
Manages vendor relationships and contract negotiations for platform technologies.
Provides regular executive reporting on platform health, project status, and strategic initiative progress.