Senior Engineering Manager - Conversation Application

Crisis Text Line is dedicated to promoting mental well-being through technology that connects individuals to trained counselors in times of crisis. They are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Conversation Applications Team, focusing on modernizing core platform services and enhancing system reliability while mentoring a high-performing engineering team.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the modernization of core platform services (PHP → Go), defining service boundaries, architectural patterns, and dependency sequencing across routing, counselor tools, and shared services
• Standardize CI/CD, deployments, observability, logging, and telemetry across AWS- and Go-based environments to enable reliable, predictable operations
• Establish SLAs, incident management practices, performance baselines, and monitoring frameworks to strengthen system resilience, reliability, and error visibility
• Drive platform maturity from ~2/5 to ~4/5 by implementing engineering standards, documentation patterns, and consistent service quality across the squad
• Own the execution and delivery of client-facing features by leading an engineering team committed to quality, velocity, and customer impact
• Own the technology strategy and develop a plan to modernize core platform services (PHP → Go), defining service boundaries, architectural patterns, and dependency sequencing across the CTL platform, volunteer management lifecycle, and other core services
• Partner with Product, Developer Platform, DevOps/SRE, and Security to align on shared infrastructure, governance, roadmap priorities, and technical dependencies
• Collaborate with Data Engineering, Research, and Analytics to ensure cross-service reliability, performant data flows, and architectural alignment across the Build department
• Lead and mentor a team of 6–8 engineers, supporting growth in architectural thinking, system ownership, delivery discipline, and engineering excellence
• Set clear expectations, provide thoughtful and actionable feedback, and cultivate a culture of reliability, autonomy, innovation, and strong documentation practices
• Serve as a coaching-focused, people-first leader who brings structure, clarity, and calm to complex platform and migration work
• Communicate with empathy while maintaining high standards, thriving in ambiguity, and modeling the team’s expected documentation, reliability, and engineering discipline

Requirements:

• 5+ years building and operating backend or platform systems in production
• 3+ years of engineering management leading teams and delivering complex initiatives
• Experience modernizing legacy systems and leading architectural migrations (e.g., PHP → Go, monolith → services)
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, API-first architecture, and service design
• Experience with AWS, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, GraphQL, and relational databases
• Ability to guide teams on AWS reliability, security, and cost best practices
• Experience establishing automated testing practices (unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing)
• Experience improving system reliability and observability (logging, monitoring, telemetry, performance tuning)
• Strong planning, prioritization, and execution in sprint-based development environments
• Architectural familiarity with Go, PHP, and React (hands-on coding not required)
• Experience leading platform modernization efforts in complex or mission-critical environments
• Ability to balance innovation, reliability, and technical debt management in architectural decision-making