Engineering Manager, Platform

Customer.io is a platform that helps companies send automated communications using real-time behavioral data. They are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a platform-focused team responsible for building and operating critical infrastructure systems.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers working on platform services. The team drives the engine of scale for Customer.io and has significant impact on reliability and data systems
• Support your team through clear goal-setting, regular feedback, career development, and thoughtful hiring
• Partner closely with staff engineers and product managers to plan and execute platform initiatives that improve scale, reliability, and developer productivity
• Drive technical execution for distributed systems that process large volumes of events with strong performance and availability requirements
• Guide architectural decisions within your team, aligning with broader platform standards and long-term direction
• Ensure your team’s services are observable, well-tested, and operationally sound
• Lead incident response for your team’s systems and foster a culture of learning and improvement through effective post-incident reviews
• Collaborate with adjacent engineering teams, security, and product partners to ensure platform work supports company priorities
• Help improve internal tooling, workflows, and processes that enable engineers to do their best work
• Leverage modern tooling—including AI-assisted development tools—where appropriate to improve team efficiency and focus

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• 3+ years of experience managing engineers, including hiring, coaching, and performance development
• Strong technical background with the ability to lead design discussions, review complex systems, and make sound architectural tradeoffs
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and modern backend systems
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts such as asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, and data pipelines
• Proven ability to deliver meaningful technical projects through a team
• Clear and effective communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to both engineers and non-engineers
• Comfort balancing people leadership with hands-on technical involvement
• Strong judgment around prioritization, execution, and reliability in ambiguous problem spaces
• Experience at high-growth SaaS companies
• Exposure to messaging systems, data pipelines, or high-throughput backend services
• Experience improving developer tooling or platform ergonomics
• Familiarity with AI/ML tooling or infrastructure