Engineering Manager

Finch; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible stipend

Health/Dental/Vision coverage

Unlimited vacation

Parental leave

401(k)

Offsite company trips

SF & NYC offices

Job summary

Finch is seeking a platforms-focused engineering leader to head the Platform team in San Francisco. You will guide infrastructure, tooling, and security work, while mentoring engineers and shaping the architecture.

With 7+ years in software engineering and 2+ years of people management, you will drive platform standards, review Terraform-based decisions, and partner with product teams to prioritize investments. The role emphasizes autonomy and high-impact delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering with platform/infrastructure focus.
• 2+ years of people-management experience.
• Hands-on Terraform, Kubernetes and CI/CD experience.
• Strong cross-functional communication and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead a 4-5 person platform engineering team with high-impact backlog.
• Own the platform roadmap with senior engineers across infra, tooling, security, and architecture.
• Make technical trade-offs and review Terraform-backed decisions and architecture changes.
• Partner with product engineering to align investments with priorities.
• Set and enforce platform standards for infrastructure-as-code, observability, deployment, and incident response.
• Drive continuous improvement of team productivity and delivery efficiency.

Skills

Platform engineering

Team leadership

Cloud & DevOps

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Job description

About Finch

We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work . To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from inception through to completion.

About Finch

We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work . To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from inception through to completion. Finch is a Series B company backed by a fantastic set of firms, angels, and our developers including General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Homebrew, BoxGroup, YCombinator, Charley (1st business hire at Plaid), Sima (ex-Head of Biz Dev at Plaid), Henrique + Pedro (co-CEOs at Brex), Jeff + Wayne (co-CEOs at Digits), Immad (CEO at Mercury), Sam (CEO at Vouch Insurance), Karim (CTO at Ramp), and more.

About Our Team

We're a team of problem solvers who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions. We value velocity, curiosity, empathy, and diverse perspectives. Everyone on the team is excited about the scope of the problems we address and the potential impact our work can have on the global workforce. We realize that the value we provide comes with great responsibilities, and therefore make security and privacy our highest priorities.

We come from a diverse set of backgrounds and each member brings different skills to the group. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and potential will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns.

About You

You've been a platform or infrastructure engineer yourself. You understand the difference between infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-an-afterthought. You know what it's like to be paged for a production issue and have used those experiences to build better systems and on-call practices. You care deeply about both technical excellence and team growth. You're energized by unblocking engineers across the organization and improving their developer experience. You can prioritize a backlog of projects, make tough trade‑off decisions, and communicate "not yet" with clarity and empathy. You balance hands‑on technical involvement with people leadership. You thrive in environments with high autonomy and limited hand‑holding.

About The Role

Finch's Platform team owns the infrastructure and developer experience that powers our engineering organization. You'll lead a 4-5 person team with a high-impact backlog spanning infrastructure stability, developer tooling, architectural decomposition, and security. The team handles tech debt paydown (CI reliability, observability consolidation), security work (PII encryption, data contamination prevention), and architectural decisions (monolith decomposition, database scaling). This is high-leverage infrastructure work that enables the entire engineering organization.

What You'll Do

• Live by and champion our values: #empathy, #execution, #humility, #curiosity.


• Manage and grow a 5-person platform engineering team: hiring, 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, and fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration.


• Own the platform roadmap alongside senior engineers— prioritize across infrastructure stability, developer tooling, security, and architectural improvements (monolith decomposition, database scaling, observability strategy).


• Make technical trade-off decisions: tech debt vs. new capabilities, build vs. buy, optimize vs. rewrite. You stay close enough to the code to review Terraform and make informed architectural decisions.


• Partner with product engineering teams and leadership to align platform investments with company priorities and communicate platform constraints and trade-offs.


• Set platform engineering standards and best practices across infrastructure-as-code, observability, deployment practices, and incident response.


• Drive continuous improvement of team productivity, engineering processes, and delivery efficiency.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with significant focus on platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps work; 2+ years of which include people-management experience.


• Hands-on platform engineering background— You've built infrastructure, written Terraform, debugged Kubernetes, or improved CI/CD pipelines yourself.


• Proven ability to manage engineering teams through complex technical projects with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and cross-team dependencies.


• Track record of growing and developing engineers, including performance management, career development, and difficult conversations.


• Experience prioritizing large backlogs and making trade-offs between tech debt, new features, stability, and developer experience.


• Strong technical communication skills— You can explain infrastructure trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and advocate for platform investments.


• Ability to balance hands‑on technical involvement with people leadership— You stay close enough to the code to maintain credibility and make informed decisions.


• Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure improvements that enable product engineering velocity.


• Bonus: Led a platform or infrastructure team before, experience with high-growth engineering organizations, security/compliance background (PII encryption, SOC2), experience managing distributed or remote teams.

Success Looks Like

• Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking


• Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus.


• CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent)


• Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred)


• Experience using a distributed messaging system.


• Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)


• Proven people management: 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, conflict resolution.


• Roadmap planning and prioritization across competing demands.


• Cross-functional stakeholder management and communication.


• Hiring and building high-performing teams.


• Creating engineering culture and setting technical standards.

What We Offer

• Flexible monthly stipend


• 100% Health/Dental/Vision coverage and 85% dependent coverage


• Unlimited vacation policy (with 3 weeks minimum)


• Parental leave


• 401(k)


• Offsite company trips


• Offices in SF & NYC

$210,000 - $230,000 a year

Finch’s compensation package includes a competitive base salary benchmarked against real-time market data, as well as equity for all full-time roles. We want all full time employees to be invested in Finch and to be able to take advantage of that investment, so our equity grants include a 10-year exercise window.

We also offer exceptional benefits, and, for applicable roles, commissions plans. Our minimum salary range for this role is: $210,000 - $230,000+.

Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on geography, candidate experience and expertise, and other factors.

Finch is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.