Engineering Manager, Platform

About the Role

Platform Engineering is the layer every part of North builds on: the services and libraries teams share, the integrations that bring in customer spend from cloud, AI, and data providers, the data platform behind every number customers see, and the infrastructure and tooling that let us build, ship, and run the product. Done well, platform engineering is a multiplier: it makes the right way to build the easy way, so North is easy to use and hard to mess up for every engineer who builds on it.

You'll lead the Platform Engineering team, which owns that whole layer today. You'll report to the VP of Engineering and work closely with them as the team scales into an organization, including how it's structured, when an area is ready for its own manager, and how we hire and grow those managers. The team is in place and its direction is set. We're looking for someone who shares our engineering philosophy and can apply it to the platform as it grows. You'll manage the engineers directly, and the role has two equally important parts. One is helping the team deliver reliably and own what they build. The other is technical depth. We work through continuous improvement in pursuit of excellence, and that means challenging engineers on designs, code, and operations with the experience to back it up.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow the engineers across Platform Engineering through regular 1:1s, clear expectations, feedback, and career development.
• Work with the VP of Engineering on how Platform Engineering grows from a team into an organization, including when a team is ready for its own manager, then hire and develop those managers.
• Treat the platform as a product for North's engineers. Build golden paths, shared patterns, and self-service tooling with guardrails instead of gates.
• Turn recurring questions, incidents, and drift into platform improvements that reach existing services, not just new ones.
• Hire for the platform teams as they grow, and help new engineers ramp up quickly.
• Turn team charters into plans and commitments the rest of North can rely on, and raise risks early.
• Make sure work starts from clear specs and technical designs, and that teams operate what they ship.
• Strengthen reliability practices, including on-call, incident response, and observability.
• Work with product, the Product Engineering teams, and customer-facing teams so platform work is driven by what customers and the business need.
• Balance long-term platform investment against near-term product needs, and explain those tradeoffs clearly.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers and leading multiple teams at once.
• Deep, hands-on experience in backend, infrastructure, or data systems, enough to challenge designs and raise the technical bar.
• A clear point of view on what platform engineering is for: enabling other teams through standardization, self-service, and guardrails, and knowing when a pattern is solid enough to scale and when it's too early to build.
• A track record of building teams that hit their commitments without heroics.
• Experience running on-call and incident response, and improving reliability over time.
• Strong writing and communication, with people inside and outside engineering.
• Comfort with ambiguity in a growing company, and a bias toward simple, durable solutions.
• Pragmatic, informed views on how AI coding tools change engineering practice.

Nice to Have

•  Experience managing managers, or growing a team into an organization with its own managers.
• Experience with AWS and data platforms at scale.
• Experience building golden paths or an internal platform that many teams adopted.
• Experience leading integration or data pipeline teams.
• Familiarity with FinOps or cloud billing data.

Work Setup

Hybrid role based in New York City, with an office in Dumbo, Brooklyn

Team members typically work in the office 2–3 days per week

OR Remote US

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave (birthing parents receive an additional 4 weeks at 50% pay)
• Two company-wide breaks per year: one around Labor Day and one at the end of the year
• Aetna Medical PPO plan with the majority of the premium covered by North
• Dental and vision insurance
• Flexible spending account (FSA) for health expenses and commuter benefits
• 30 day sabbatical every 4 years