Senior Platform & Backend Engineering Manager

Jobtailor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor in San Francisco seeks an experienced backend engineering leader to guide a team of platform and backend engineers. You will own execution across Platform projects, set priorities, and drive design through production with ongoing reviews and mentorship.

You will collaborate with the Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and priorities, balancing speed, reliability, and cost while raising the team’s technical bar.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Previous experience directly managing a software engineering team.
• Strong hands-on backend engineering experience and willingness to continue writing production code.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed backend systems.
• Strong system design and software architecture skills.
• Experience building production systems on AWS or another major cloud platform.
• Experience owning production systems with meaningful scale, reliability, and availability requirements.
• Strong understanding of databases, APIs, asynchronous systems, queues, caching, and distributed architectures.
• Experience with infrastructure, observability, deployment systems, and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects from ambiguity through production.
• Ability to effectively manage both senior and junior engineers.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work across engineering, product, ML, and business teams.
• Experience with Python and modern backend frameworks.
• Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS/EKS, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudWatch, or related technologies.
• Experience operating event-driven or asynchronous distributed systems.
• Experience building systems with strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Experience with containers, infrastructure-as-code, and modern CI/CD systems.
• Experience building data infrastructure or large-scale processing pipelines.
• Experience supporting ML systems, model inference, LLM applications, or AI infrastructure.
• Experience in healthcare technology or other regulated environments.
• Experience with HIPAA-compliant systems and healthcare data.
• Experience working in fast-moving startup environments where engineering leaders remain deeply involved in execution.
• Legally authorized to work in the US
• Must answer whether visa sponsorship or transfer will be required.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and develop a team of platform and backend engineers.
• Own execution and delivery across Platform projects.
• Set priorities, break down ambiguous projects, and move projects from design through production.
• Run technical planning, design reviews, and engineering reviews.
• Coach senior and junior engineers and raise the team’s technical bar.
• Partner with the Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and organizational priorities.
• Identify and resolve execution risks.
• Design and build production backend and platform systems.
• Take ownership of technically difficult or high-priority projects.
• Review architecture, code, infrastructure changes, and technical designs.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Team Management

AWS Cloud Services

System Design

Distributed Systems

Python

Backend Frameworks

Databases

APIs

Asynchronous Systems

Infrastructure-as-Code

CI/CD Systems

Data Processing Pipelines

Model Inference

Event-Driven Systems

HIPAA Compliance

Healthcare Technology

Tools

AWS Lambda

ECS/EKS

SQS

RDS

DynamoDB

S3

CloudWatch

Job description

Jobtailor in San Francisco seeks an experienced backend engineering leader to guide a team of platform and backend engineers. You will own execution across Platform projects, set priorities, and drive design through production with ongoing reviews and mentorship.

You will collaborate with the Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and priorities, balancing speed, reliability, and cost while raising the team’s technical bar.