Senior Engineering Manager; Platform

Position: Senior Engineering Manager (Platform)

About the Role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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 (Dev Ex), 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

Requirements

• 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

Nice to Have

• Experience with Ruby on Rails or Node.js 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

Compensation

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…