Sr. Engineering Manager, Platform

Role Overview

Sr. Engineering Manager for the Platform team at Vercel. You will lead two engineering teams—Reliability & Resilience and Developer Productivity—driving the platform roadmap, operational excellence, and people leadership.

What You Will Do

• Lead and grow a team of ~7 engineers across two teams, with a growth path to 10+.
• Define org structure, hiring plan, and delivery goals.
• Own platform strategy and execution to improve:
  • development velocity and iteration speed
  • platform availability
  • deployment safety
• Build and run an industry-leading reliability practice:
  • manage SLOs and error budgets
  • lead incident response and postmortems
  • prioritize resilience work across critical services
• Operate and evolve core platform services including:
  • API gateway
  • storage and caching infrastructure
  • secrets management
  • observability
• Manage capacity and cost (forecasting, right-sizing, tuning, spend governance tied to workload and growth)
• Own and manage relationships with critical SaaS vendors (evaluation, contracts/renewals, and operational integration)

What You Bring

• 3+ years managing engineers (managing managers is a plus)
• Hands-on technical depth in Kubernetes production operations and CI/CD systems
• Proven ownership of platform dependencies such as API gateways, caches, and large-scale KV stores/databases
• Demonstrated ownership of reliability programs: SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortems, with measurable downtime reduction
• Ability to translate business goals into technical strategy and drive cross-org alignment
• 8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Strong leadership behaviors: trust/psychological safety, clear expectations, and timely candid feedback
• Skilled facilitator in technical conflict (listen, synthesize, decide, and align the team)

Bonus

• Experience using the Vercel platform

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package including equity
• Inclusive healthcare package
• Mentorship and support to attend events
• Flexible time off
• Equipment and WFH budget

Location / Work Model

• Located in the US (preferably NYC or SF); remote considered for exceptional candidates
• If within commuting distance of SF, NY, London, or Berlin, includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday even when listed as remote.