Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Marqeta is seeking an experienced Senior Manager, Platform Engineering to lead their infrastructure software engineering team responsible for a Kubernetes-based compute platform. This role involves driving platform modernization, cost optimization, and operational excellence while mentoring a team of engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of infrastructure software engineers focused on Kubernetes platform engineering
• Build a culture of innovation, operational excellence, and customer-focused platform development
• Recruit top talent and develop career growth paths for team members
• Foster collaboration with application development teams, SRE, security, and other infrastructure teams
• Drive technical decision-making while empowering engineers to own their solutions
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for Marqeta's Kubernetes compute platform
• Drive continuous platform modernization to support evolving business needs and scale requirements
• Champion platform-as-a-product mindset, treating internal engineering teams as customers
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies and AWS services to improve platform capabilities
• Lead architectural decisions for container orchestration, service mesh, observability, and developer tooling
• Develop and implement strategies to optimize Kubernetes infrastructure costs without compromising performance or reliability
• Monitor and analyze compute resource utilization, identifying opportunities for right-sizing and efficiency gains
• Implement FinOps practices including chargeback/showback models, budget alerting, and cost allocation
• Drive adoption of cost-effective AWS services and spot instances where appropriate
• Partner with engineering teams to optimize application resource requests and limits
• Ensure ultra-high availability of the production Kubernetes platform supporting payment processing workloads
• Establish SLOs/SLIs for platform reliability and performance
• Lead incident response for platform-level issues and drive continuous improvement through blameless postmortems
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions
• Balance innovation with stability through disciplined change management and deployment practices
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation for platform infrastructure
• Apply software development best practices to infrastructure code (testing, code review, version control)
• Drive infrastructure-as-code initiatives using Terraform and other automation tools
• Collaborate with security teams to embed security into the platform and SDLC
• Enable developer productivity through self-service capabilities and golden paths

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles
• 5+ years of people management experience, leading technical teams through complex initiatives
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments at scale (architecture, operations, troubleshooting)
• Extensive Cloud fundamental knowledge (AWS preferred, including EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, and other core services)
• Proven track record of Kubernetes cost optimization and resource efficiency improvements
• Strong understanding of SDLC methodologies, CI/CD practices, and infrastructure-as-code
• Experience managing ultra-high availability systems (99.99%+ uptime) in production
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with container technologies, service mesh, and cloud-native architectures
• Strong technical leadership skills with ability to influence without authority across the organization
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in payments, financial services, or other highly regulated industries
• Familiarity with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and compliance requirements in cloud environments
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or Security Specialty)
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, AWS App Mesh)
• Background with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)
• Knowledge of GitOps practices and tools (ArgoCD, Flux)
• Experience with multi-tenancy and platform security patterns
• Familiarity with FinOps frameworks and cloud cost management tools