Senior Engineering Manager

Are you a seasoned engineering leader passionate about platform reliability, developer experience, and operational excellence? We're seeking a Senior Engineering Manager  | Platform to lead our talented Platform team at Thinkific.

As the Senior Engineering Manager, Platform, you'll drive the technical vision, strategy and execution for the infrastructure and architecture powering thousands of online course creators worldwide. You'll lead and grow a team focused on Kubernetes-based infrastructure, AWS cloud services, reliability engineering, observability and developer experience enabling Thinkific's products to scale effectively and securely.

In this role, you'll shape our technical direction, drive improvements in reliability and performance and build a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence. You will lead a team of senior and staff engineers and work closely with product management and senior leadership to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Your goal is to design and evolve the architecture and build, scale and optimize a reliable, secure, and developer-friendly platform that supports rapid product innovation and high availability.

• Own the platform engineering roadmap, driving strategic initiatives to ensure our Kubernetes and AWS-based infrastructure meets high standards for reliability, security, and scalability. Help define our long term technical direction to bring clarity and alignment across our engineering organization 
• Lead and mentor engineers and Staff SREs, helping them manage technical domains effectively, raise the technical bar and enhance overall team capabilities.
• Define, track, and improve Developer Experience (DevEx), using metrics frameworks such as CORE4, SPACE and DORA, ensuring engineering teams are productive, efficient, and satisfied.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (engineering, product management, security) to design robust CI/CD pipelines, automate operations and implement secure-by-default practices.
• Cultivate a culture of reliability and observability, championing proactive incident management, blameless postmortems and continuous learning.
• Set and track meaningful SLOs/SLIs, ensuring that observability practices provide deep insights into infrastructure performance and reliability.
• Communicate clearly and proactively, maintaining alignment between platform initiatives and broader company strategy.

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 10+ years of infrastructure, platform engineering, or software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing engineering teams.
• Possesses extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), AWS infrastructure (EKS, RDS, IAM, ALB, S3) and Terraform-based infrastructure as code.
• Demonstrates strong understanding and practical experience with observability tools (New Relic) and can effectively leverage them for reliability and performance insights.
• Is experienced in leveraging structured frameworks like SPACE and DORA to measure and improve Developer Experience, productivity and operational outcomes.
• Has significant experience leading teams responsible for managing large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure that supports diverse technical stacks.
• Is an effective communicator, collaborator and strategic thinker, able to clearly articulate platform vision to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Brings a deep sense of ownership, accountability and passion for reliability and developer productivity.

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job: 

• Experience with Ruby on Rails or in production environments.
• Familiarity with secure software supply chains, Cloudflare configurations and advanced CDN/load balancing strategies.
• Exposure to managing multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters or complex networking environments.

The recruitment compensation range for this position is $169,000 - $253,000 CAD. Your specific compensation within this range is determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal equity assessment.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

This is just our initial idea of who we're looking for At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we've described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.

We're also committed to providing a comfortable and accessible interview experience for every candidate. If there are any accommodations our team can make throughout our hiring process (big or small), please let us know.