Sr. Engineering Manager, Core Services - Slack

Slack; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Slack is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Core Services team to maintain high-scale, reliable infrastructure that users rely on daily. You will own the technical direction and drive critical migration efforts, with a focus on performance, reliability, and cross-functional collaboration.

The role requires 5+ years leading backend systems at scale, strong architecture skills, and the ability to align stakeholders across Product, Security, and AWS.

Qualifications

• Led engineering teams for large-scale, high-availability backend systems.
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering, with depth in architecture, caching, observability, and reliability.
• Ability to build SME knowledge quickly in a new domain and drive cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and roadmap for Core Services: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, Enterprise Key Management, IDR, and Image Proxying/Uploads.
• Lead a multi-system migration from Flannel to Loom while preserving reliability for millions of users.
• Drive delivery and execution with emphasis on reliability, planning, launches, incident follow-ups, and cost/operational analyses.
• Own on-call operations and incident management for Tier 0 services, manage rotations, triage issues, and improve runbooks and tooling.
• Partner with product, sales, security, AWS and other teams on dependencies, timelines, and risks.
• Represent team work in leadership reviews and planning, building compelling business and technical cases for investments.
• Build a high-trust team culture, hire well, manage performance, mentor leaders, and celebrate wins.
• Manage cost and capacity for services at scale, collaborate on AWS spend trends, and drive cost-saving initiatives like Loom migration.
• Promote AI development tooling while preserving engineering rigor and quality for critical infrastructure.

Skills

Team leadership

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Go/Java

Tools

Go

Java

PHP/Hack

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

Software Engineering

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn't a buzzword - it's a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You're in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

Slack is looking for an Engineering Manager on the Core Services engineering team. The purpose of this role is to keep Slack working seamlessly at massive scale - it's the infrastructure that keeps Slack feeling lightning fast. This person will be a steward of some of the most critical, high-throughput systems at Slack - the kind of work where doing it well means millions of users, at the world's most important and interesting companies, never experience a hiccup.

About The Opportunity

We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. Our team maintains and builds performant services that include:

• Edge Caches
• Realtime Services
• Enterprise Key Management (EKM)
• International Data Residency (IDR)
• Image Uploads, Downloads, and Proxying

We've done our job correctly when none of our users think about us, much like a vital utility. We don't typically ship new user-facing features, but rather ensure our systems are exceptionally performant, highly available, reliable, and scalable. In other words, we make Slack work seamlessly. Slack's backend services are written in Go and Java, and Slack's API is built on PHP/Hack.

The Core Services Team

We are a team building critical services that enable Slack to scale for our largest customers. Our edge caches power the most latency-critical queries for our largest entities today, serving approximately 35% of all Slack API traffic. Our Realtime Services (RTS) power Slack's core messaging stack - running 10 services, 4 of which are mission-critical Tier 0 services - ensuring that messages, presence, and real-time events are delivered reliably at scale. We also own services that power Slack's Enterprise Key Management and International Data Residency features, enabling Slack to win and retain enterprise and government customers with strict compliance requirements (FedRAMP/NIST).

We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability are the foundations of our work.

We are actively building the future of edge services at Slack, so we can support a growing number of globally distributed customers with their compliance requirements with minimal latency.

What You'll Be Doing

• Owning the technical direction and roadmap across the Core Services portfolio: Edge Caches, Realtime Services, Enterprise Key Management, International Data Residency, and Image Proxying and Uploads. You'll have large footprint and the opportunity to drive major impact. And you'll decide what to invest in now, what to sequence later, and what to decline - balancing reliability, migration, and new capability work.
• Leading a multi-system migration of Flannel to Loom, our next-generation edge cache, while keeping the current systems running at full reliability for millions of users. You'll drive the team to ship new capabilities without introducing risk to infrastructure that people depend on daily.
• Driving delivery and execution while maintaining reliability as a top priority, including sprint planning, product launches, incident follow-ups, operational sustainability analyses, and building the technical case for investment with leadership. You'll ensure the team doesn't trade reliability for velocity, but is always high-performing.
• Owning on-call operations and incident management for Tier 0 services. You'll manage on-call rotations across partnering teams, triage production issues, lead incident response for your services, and drive improvements to runbooks, alerting, and operational tooling.
• Partnering cross-functionally with Product, Sales, Compliance, Security, AWS, and other infrastructure teams on dependencies, timelines, and risks. You'll be the shortest path to solutions - whether it's unblocking a compliance audit for South Korea, coordinating IDR region launches with Sales and AWS, or negotiating priorities with partner teams for shared work.
• Representing your team's work in leadership reviews, quarterly and annual planning, and executive forums. You'll build compelling business-and-technical cases for your team's investments and tell your leadership what's really going on early enough that nothing becomes a fire drill.
• Building and maintaining a high-trust team culture where engineers do impactful work and grow. You'll hire well, manage performance with fairness and transparency, mentor emerging technical leaders, and celebrate your team's wins.
• Managing cost and capacity for services that run at massive scale, working with finance on AWS spend trends, exec-approved budget increases, and cost-saving initiatives like the Loom migration (projected $1-2M savings).
• Driving the team to adopt AI development tooling for maximum impact, while maintaining engineering rigor and quality for critical infrastructure.

You're Our Person If

• You've led engineering teams for 5+ years building and operating high-scale, high-availability backend infrastructure or distributed systems.
• You have strong software engineering fundamentals with previous experience as a Senior+ backend engineer, with enough depth to be credible in architecture discussions about caching, distributed systems, observability and reliability best practices, and system design - and to build SME knowledge in a new area fast.
• You