Engineering Manager - Platform

What you’ll lead and how you’ll work

As an Engineering Manager of Platform at Shelf, you will own the delivery of the Platform infrastructure—the foundation that enables the core capabilities of a future-proof knowledge platform. You will manage and grow a backend-centric Platform team consisting of software engineers, DevOps, SRE, and QA specialists, partnering closely with Staff Engineers, Tech Leads, Product Managers, and other Engineering Managers who lead product development teams.

You’ll set clear contracts and boundaries between platform surfaces and product services; prevent creating bespoke solutions for product teams;  earn self-service adoption with strong defaults, and drive complex migration programs with thoughtful deprecations rather than rewrites. 

Reliability will be operated efficiently with SLOs and error budgets; incidents will be handled with a healthy on‑call, runbooks, and blameless reviews; and cost will be measured and managed as a first‑class outcome. While product teams own their services and on‑call, the Platform team provides the defaults, guardrails, and consultation.

Together with Product Managers, you’ll exercise product thinking to enhance developer productivity, reduce cognitive load, and ultimately, decrease time-to-market.

What you’ll bring

You’ve managed platform/infrastructure teams in product companies that operate multi-tenant distributed systems processing big volumes of structured or unstructured data. You’re comfortable operating in AWS with event‑driven/serverless patterns and modern data pipelines, and you can challenge solution designs and sequence complex migrations with high delivery velocity while maintaining high system uptime.

You’ve built paved roads that product teams adopt voluntarily, run successful architecture modernization programs, and operate to SLOs and error budgets, solving development, cross-team collaboration, and production support challenges. 

You have a proven track record of developing Tech Leads and Senior ICs, hire well, and foster a culture that values reliability, learning, and clear ownership.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

In the first 3 months, you will establish a transparent approach to the Platform Roadmap, accounting for the business needs and proactively accommodating external factors, such as cloud provider system updates and API deprecations. You will delineate the boundaries between platform and product team scopes. 

By the end of your first year, Platform will be measurably easier and safer to build on. Most new services will adopt the paved road by default. Platform-owned surfaces will adhere to explicit SLOs, featuring a visible error budget policy and faster recovery when incidents occur. A new region will be live with the same IaC, observability, and compliance posture as our existing regions, and our unit costs per request and per GB processed will trend down with regular reviews and targeted optimizations.

Key Responsibilities

1. Roadmap co-creation: Collaborate with the Platform PM and StaffEng to develop the roadmap: balance business needs, technical dependencies, and external factors.

2. Implement technical strategy: Deliver the platform enhancements and perform updates and migrations according to the architecture and technical direction defined by Staff Engineers in collaboration with the Platform and Product teams.

3. SLO-driven reliability: Operate platform services to explicit SLOs with visible error budgets. Reduce Platform-related CFR and MTTR constituents, and enhance system resilience according to reliability standards.

4. Developer Experience: Partner with Staff Engineers and Technical Leads to ensure platform surfaces meet the defined contracts and boundaries, and that the paved roads, service templates, CI/CD patterns, and IaC modules are used to their best advantage.

5. FinOps & cost management: Drive projects to optimize unit economics (cost per request, per GB processed, per tenant) and cost allocation as first-class engineering outcomes.

6. Tech Lead and Senior IC development: Coach the Platform Tech Lead and senior ICs through implementation challenges, 1:1s, and hands-on technical mentorship.

7. Process & tooling optimization: Refine SDLC, observability practices, and engineering workflows.. Champion AI-assisted development and automation.

8. Stakeholder communication: Report platform health, delivery status, and operational metrics to leadership. Showcase how platform capabilities enable product velocity and demonstrate measurable impact on developer productivity and system reliability.

9. Autonomous day-to-day execution: Operate independently to clear delivery blockers, manage operational risks, and balance platform evolution with stability, security, and compliance requirements (GDPR, data residency, audit trails).

   
   

Qualifications

Note: This position does not assume developing system architecture and daily coding.

• 4+ years of Engineering Management experience leading cross-functional, backend-centric teams (10+ engineers) in product companies operating multi-tenant SaaS systems.

• 5+ years as a Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead, or Staff Engineer with deep Node.js or Python expertise.

• Understanding of AWS cloud primitives; hands-on experience with compute, storage, messaging, and databases (SQL and NoSQL).

• Infrastructure as Code experience: CI/CD pipeline design and optimization.

• Experience with API management (versioning, backward-compatibility, contract testing), service catalogs, and developer experience tooling.

• Personally built and operated distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native applications; led complex migrations.

• Comfortable with high-volume data processing, and schema design/performance tuning at scale.

• Translate complex technical constraints into business-intelligible trade-offs; align platform capabilities with product team needs.

• Experience with SLO/error budget frameworks, incident management, FinOps, and observability best practices.

• Strong track record coaching Tech Leads and Senior ICs, implementing SDLC and reliability practices, and partnering with Product Management

• Present work effectively through clear architecture diagrams, documentation, and verbal communication; communicate technical strategies to leadership.

• Proficiency with AI-powered development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.) and eagerness to push AI-assisted engineering workflows.

• Proactive problem-solver with genuine curiosity - never satisfied with "good enough", constantly refining tools and approaches.

• As a plus, the Databricks or Snowflake integration experience is beneficial.

  
  

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract.

• Company Stock Options.

• Hardware: MacBook Pro.

• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software.

• GitHub Copilot subscription.

• Access to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, TypingMind, and MCP Servers.

  
  

Why Shelf:

• GenAI is expected to be a $4 trillion market by 2032, and Shelf is a core infrastructure that enables GenAI to be deployed at scale.

• Our Leadership Team possesses deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise, as well as an enterprise SaaS background, to execute this plan effectively.

• We've been helping our customers prevent knowledge mismanagement since our founding in 2017.

• We have raised over $60 million in funding, with investors including Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Base10, and others.

• We have experienced high velocity growth, powered by the most innovative product in our category, achieving 3X growth for 3 consecutive years.

• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries, and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months.