[Remote] Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Murmuration is a mission-driven organization that uses data, technology, and services to help partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively. The Senior Manager, Platform Engineering will lead and grow a multidisciplinary Platform Team spanning DevOps, Application Security, SRE, and FinOps, owning shared systems and tooling that enable engineering teams to ship quickly, safely, and reliably. The role also involves setting technical strategy, leading cross-team initiatives, managing platform risks and incidents, and developing high-trust, high-performing teams.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical strategy for the team: Build an engineering roadmap that keeps the team focused on big-picture objectives and that reflects tradeoffs among competing priorities, dependencies, and complexities across DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps. Propose clear recommendations and plans, and present well-reasoned documentation of tradeoffs and alternatives
• Manage technical debt and process health: Maintain a steady cadence of debt paydown, prioritizing which debt to tackle and communicating the reasoning behind those choices. Own the schedule of dependency and application updates so end-of-life deadlines are handled proactively rather than as last-minute fire drills
• Deliver production-ready platforms: Own the platforms and tooling that give other teams a stable, observable foundation of reliability, performance, and operational excellence so they can focus on building and testing their own applications on top of it
• Strengthen application security: Introspect codebases to identify vulnerabilities early, and own data privacy and access control as first-class concerns; deliver solutions that support secure coding practices across the org without owning how other teams write their code
• Enable FinOps visibility: Build and own the single panes of glass that give engineering leadership and the C-suite a clear, trusted view of cloud and infrastructure costs, supporting both short-term budget decisions and long-term cost strategy
• Architect for the long term: Design and build systems and architectures that will serve Murmuration for years with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns
• Coach and empower emerging leaders: Coach leaders to lead at every level: Within their own teams, as good, collaborative, and experienced peers, and through mentoring ICs around them
• Resolve ambiguity: Actively shape and bring structure and clarity (not perfection) to specs
• Listen and elevate: Stay closely attuned to how other teams approach test strategy, code quality, and system design, and use that insight to ensure that what our team builds and delivers elevates their developer journey
• Be like Ted Lasso: Believe, coach the whole team, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability
• Lead beyond the Platform team: Own objectives that span multiple teams and align with division and organizational goals
• Be the voice: Lead with ownership and accountability on behalf of DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps; seek opportunities to add clarity, make high-quality recommendations, and be a decision-maker in discussions with product and leadership
• Identify risk: Identify, document, and follow-up in a timely manner on vulnerabilities and operational risk across the full platform, including applications built by other teams
• Lead incident response: Involve the right people across DevOps, App Security, SRE and FinOps, lead the response, conduct root cause analysis, and follow through until learnings are shared, incorporated, and remediation is complete
• Build one internal engineering system, not four Platform teams: Treat DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps as interdependent subsystems where the outcome depends on how well they integrate, not how well each performs alone
• Present a cohesive voice and narrative externally: Lead with expertise and a cohesive single voice about the Platform Team's mission and deliverables to our peer teams
• Be curious about people, not just systems: Identify opportunities to foster curiosity and ease communication between people who come from different backgrounds, experiences, and technical lenses
• Use AI to amplify: Surface risks and gaps that manual review would miss, and measure team progress together towards shared goals

Skills

• • Deep, hands-on expertise across DevOps and SRE: Your direct prior experience informs your approach to prioritizing competing work, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and explaining how a decision in DevOps, SRE, AppSec, or FinOps supports the organization as a whole
• • Sound judgment under imperfect information: Make tradeoff calls to generate clarity in ambiguous situations
• • Communicates effectively: Explain to non-technical leadership why an architecture decision is sound without needing the original author in the room
• • Champions team decisions: Advocate for the team's technical decisions to peers, product, and leadership
• • Lead execution at scale: Lead technical execution for initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks
• • Turn strategy into shipped deliverables: Translate objectives aligned with division and organizational goals into clear epics, stories, and tickets, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers
• • Plan through ambiguity: Estimate large, cross-team projects with unknowns, building mitigation plans for what's unresolved, and breaking work into milestones and iterations to reduce risk and deliver incremental value
• • Drive to completion: Involve decision makers, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner, in a timely manner, until an outcome is delivered
• • Multiply team effectiveness: Use technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements to multiply the impact of both the Platform Team and the Engineering organization
• • Influence beyond the team: Shape outcomes beyond your own team through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy
• • Mentor future leaders: Develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small-group knowledge sharing
• • Raise the engineering bar: Drive the standards and best practices that raise the bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others
• • Lead by example: Proactively share context and learnings with an eye to creating the kind of high-trust, high-performing team culture that makes everyone better
• • 10+ years of professional software manager engineering experience with demonstrated fluency across infrastructure, systems, and application layers, and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of languages, tools, and technology stacks
• • A quality-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving infrastructure and deployment safety checks at the team or product level
• • A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines
• • Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering practices
• • Production experience with AWS, including compute, storage, and networking services
• • Proficiency with Docker, Make, or similar build tools, as well as environment scripting
• • Fluency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) across AWS, GCP, and Azure providers sufficient to evaluate design decisions, not just approve them
• • Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems
• • Familiarity with security practices such as vulnerability scanning, secrets management, and secure SDLC
• • Knowledge of compliance and regulatory frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, NIST CSF) and how they shape engineering decisions
• • Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale
• • Direct experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, and tracing) using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana
• • Working knowledge of incident management practices: On-call rotations, escalation, and postmortem processes
• • Familiarity with cloud cost and billing platforms sufficient to build tooling that supports both short- and long-term budget decisions
• • Familiarity with Voter File Data
• • Experience with or interest in political data
• • A background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations

Benefits

• Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members
• Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match
• A flexible unlimited PTO plan
• Generous paid parental leave
• Pre-tax commuter benefits
• A company laptop
• A flexible remote work environment
• A home office setup stipend for all new employees
• Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses
• A yearly professional development fund
• Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help
• Yearly in-person staff retreats
• A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging

Company Overview