Senior Engineering Manager, Platform

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Engineering teams at Ethos. You'll own the systems that power every policy we sell, from the moment a customer enters our funnel through the lifetime of that policy. This is a hands‑on leadership role that can operate at both altitude and depth.

Key responsibilities

• Own the outcomes for your domain end to end — the strategy, the technical direction, and the results.
• Hire, grow, and retain strong engineers and leads, and mentor the team through design and architecture reviews.
• Partner with Product and Staff Engineers to build the technical roadmap and run quarterly planning.
• Own cross‑team architectural decisions and internal standards such as service decomposition, event schema evolution, inter‑service contract stability, and data consistency.
• Set the engineering quality bar — system reliability, test coverage, incident response SLAs, and on‑call health.
• Drive operational excellence: observability, runbook quality, postmortem culture, and reduction of toil.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into well‑scoped projects with clear milestones and honest timelines.

Required profile

• 3+ years of engineering management experience in high‑growth organizations, including managing senior ICs and leads.
• Track record of building high‑performing teams and developing engineers.
• Experience managing platform teams, not just product feature teams.
• Strong written communication – clear in PRDs, design docs, postmortems, and upward reporting.
• Champion of engineering quality: design patterns, code reviews, and disciplined testing.
• Self‑starter comfortable with ambiguity and able to make trade‑off decisions quickly.

Required skills

• Kafka and async event processing with schema versioning.
• Relational databases and distributed caching for large‑scale web applications.
• AWS cloud services.
• TypeScript and Node.js backend development (Go or Python a bonus).
• Datadog or equivalent for SLO definition, alerting, and incident triage.