Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

What you’ll do:

• Directly manage a team growing to 5–7 senior engineers — 1:1s, goal setting, feedback, career development, performance management — and build the team itself: you'll drive recruiting for several of your own hires in your first year and own their onboarding
• Own your domain’s technical outcomes: delivery, reliability, and the consequences of its big technical bets – in close partnership with senior and staff engineers and your product counterpart
• Partner with product to balance feature development with tech debt drawdown, infrastructure investments, and other efforts to improve velocity and drive compounding progress
• Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
• Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
• Represent your team with stakeholders and leadership: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
• Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck

What you’ll bring:

• Exceptional alignment with
• GiveDirectly Values
• and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
• Language Requirement: English
• 3+ years managing software engineers through full delivery cycles
• 8+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth
• Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
• You enable speed through focus and create clarity in ambiguity: cutting through complexity to the strategic kernel and shielding the team from distraction, so a senior team can move fast and autonomously
• Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact
• Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you’re excited by this, rather than daunted by it