Platform Engineering Manager — Internal Dev Platform Lead

Gibson Dunn

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 230,000 - 300,000

Full time

2 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Health care

Retirement benefits

Paid time off

Parental leave

Basic life insurance

Flexible Spending Accounts

Discretionary bonuses

Job summary

Gibson Dunn located in New York City or Washington, D.C. seeks an Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering to lead the internal developer platform, driving productivity, reliability, and security across the firm’s engineering teams.

You will own the team roadmap, deliver across CI/CD, IaC, cloud, and AI-related infrastructure, while developing engineers and maintaining an effective operating rhythm. The role combines hands-on leadership with strategic oversight in a global professional services

Qualifications

Proven people leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, and team development.
Strong delivery-management track record across planning, execution, and risk.
Solid technical grounding across Go/Python, CI/CD, IaC/GitOps, cloud (AWS/Azure), Kubernetes, observability/SRE, platform security, and test automation, sufficient to review code, guide architecture, and make sound trade-offs.
Excellent stakeholder communication and cross-functional collaboration.
Familiarity with ITIL best practices (incident, change, and problem management) preferred.
Experience leading within Lean or Agile organizations (e.g., Scrum, SAFe) preferred.
Cloud certifications and a prior individual-contributor platform or SRE background preferred.
Working knowledge of emerging AI governance frameworks (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001) preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop a team of platform engineers, fostering a high-performing, inclusive, and collaborative engineering culture.
Own performance management, career development, goal-setting, and retention; provide regular, actionable feedback.
Balance individual growth with team delivery, removing blockers and supporting engineers’ success.
Own the Platform Engineering roadmap and delivery, translating firm and engineering strategy into prioritized, well-scoped engineering work.
Ensure predictable, high-quality delivery through effective planning, execution, and risk management.
Establish and run the team’s operating rhythm (planning, standups, code review culture, retrospectives, and on-call).
Review designs and code, guide architecture, and make sound technical trade-offs.
Shape platform architecture, coding standards, and long-term direction.
Champion a code-first, everything-as-code culture and measurable developer-experience outcomes.
Ensure the team extends platform standards to AI systems, including version-controlled prompts, retrieval configurations, evaluations, and release processes alongside application code.
Hold accountability for platform reliability, SLOs, incident management, and on-call health, and continuous improvement of operational maturity.
Ensure robust pipelines-as-code, release-management, and test-automation practices that enable safe, frequent delivery.
Ensure platform security and compliance obligations are met, partnering with security and governance teams.
Ensure the platform accounts for AI-specific operational and security realities, including provider outages, graceful degradation across models, non-deterministic failure modes, silent quality regressions after model updates, inference and GPU cost management, prompt-injection and data-exfiltration defenses, output filtering, and confidentiality constraints across prompts, retrieval, and agent tool access.
Partner with development teams, business stakeholders, and IT leadership to align platform investments with firm needs.
Manage relationships with strategic vendors, along with budgets, licensing, and SLAs.
Communicate roadmap, progress, risks, and outcomes clearly to leadership.
Own hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning to build and scale a strong engineering team.
Invest in engineers’ technical and professional growth and support mentorship and communities of practice.
Promote a culture of ownership, learning, reliability, and continuous improvement.