Sr Engineering Manager, Platform

Ethos Watch; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Ethos is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Platform Engineering in Bengaluru. You will own the outcomes for your domain, influence architecture and policy, and drive reliability and velocity across critical systems powering our products.

This hands-on leadership role requires building high-performing teams, mentoring engineers, and shaping the technical roadmap with Product and Staff Engineers. Apply to shape the culture and delivery at Ethos.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering management in high-growth organizations.
• Track record building high-performing teams and developing engineers.
• Experience managing platform teams, not just product feature teams.
• Strong written communication across PRDs, design docs, and postmortems.
• Champions engineering quality with design patterns and testing.
• Self-starter comfortable with ambiguity and speed-based decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes for your domain end-to-end with strategy and results.
• Hire, grow, and mentor engineers and leads; drive reviews.
• Partner with Product and Staff Engineers to build technical roadmaps.
• Own cross-team architectural decisions and internal standards.
• Set engineering quality bar: reliability, test coverage, incident response.

Skills

Engineering management

Team leadership

Platform teams

Written communication

Quality engineering

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

Kafka

AWS

Datadog

TypeScript/Node.js

Go

Python

Job description

About the role

Were looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Engineering teams at Ethos. Youll 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

You will be the outcome owner for the area you lead, accountable for the reliability, correctness, and velocity of the systems every other team depends on. Platform is where engineering leverage compounds, and youll join at a point where you can shape the architecture, the strategy, and the culture of the team.

Duties and 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 the internal standards other teams build on: 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 the reduction of toil.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped projects with clear milestones and honest timelines.

Qualifications and Skills:

Leadership

• 3+ years of engineering management experience in high-growth organizations, including managing senior ICs and leads.
• A track record of building high-performing teams and developing engineers to the next level.
• Experience managing platform teams, not just product feature teams.
• Strong written communication - clear in PRDs, design docs, postmortems, and upward reporting.
• Champions engineering quality: design patterns, code reviews, and disciplined unit, integration, and contract testing.
• A self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity and able to make trade-off decisions at speed without much guidance.

Technical

• A strong engineering foundation - youve shipped production services and can hold your own in architecture reviews without being the day-to-day coder.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven microservices: Kafka, async event processing, and schema versioning.
• Backend architecture for large, high-scale web applications, including relational databases, distributed caching, and resilience patterns such as retries and dead-letter handling.
• Experience with AWS, and with TypeScript/Node.js backend services at scale (Go or Python a bonus).
• Comfort with Datadog or an equivalent for SLO definition, alerting, and incident triage.

Don t meet every single requirement If you re excited about this role but your past experience don t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. At Ethos we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace.