Tech Lead and Manager (TLM), Production Engineering

Ramp; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Centralized home-office equipment

Health and wellness stipend

Budget for intra-office travel

Weekly coffee stipend

Job summary

Ramp is seeking a Production Engineer Lead who is a full software engineer with a focus on infrastructure. You will own systems end-to-end, write production code, and drive technical outcomes across the organization.

As a Tech Lead & Manager, you will lead and grow a team while remaining hands-on, setting direction, and delivering impactful infrastructure improvements. You will build and operate critical infrastructure across Ramp's compute, storage, messaging, and observability stack, drive

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Staff+-level technical leadership experience.
• Hands-on experience with production-grade distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Build, coach, and grow a high-performing team with clarity and feedback.
• Set technical direction for your domain and drive high-leverage work.
• Build and operate critical infrastructure across compute, storage, messaging, and observability stacks.
• Lead architectural changes and own the path forward to reliability and scalability.
• Partner with product teams to review architectures and embed golden paths.

Skills

Software engineering

Leadership

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

AWS

Tools

AWS

Job description

About Ramp

Ramp is building the smart infrastructure for finance teams, embedded in the transaction flow of every dollar a business spends. We automate how over $200B in annualized spend flows in and out of 70,000+ companies: authorizing payments, flagging risk, categorizing spend, and closing books.

The problems are high-stakes, data-dense, and unforgiving.

We hire people with high agency and high urgency. We look for slope over intercept. We care less about where you trained and more about what you’ve built. At Ramp, everyone is a builder who owns problems end to end and makes consequential decisions that shape the outcome.

The median Ramp customer saves 5% and grows revenue 16% in their first year – far in excess of businesses operating without Ramp. We believe every ambitious company deserves the same.

If you want to build systems that directly shape how companies move and manage billions, Ramp is the place to do it.

About Production Engineering

Production Engineering is Ramp's infrastructure ownership layer. We exist to make Ramp faster, more reliable, and more scalable — and we do that by being embedded in the problems, not adjacent to them.

A few things that define how we operate:

• One team, one company, one objective. There is no "infra team" and "product team" — there is Ramp. We share the company's goals as our own. When a product team struggles with reliability or scalability, that is our struggle.
• If reliability or scalability is at risk, we own it. We don't wait to be invited, and we don't ask whose code it is. If a system is slow, if it breaks, if it won't scale — that's ours to lead, regardless of where it lives in the stack.
• We go first, and we go fast. When the path isn't obvious, we don't wait for someone else to find it. We move with urgency, propose the solution, align the stakeholders, and stay in until it's done — not until our ticket is closed.
• We lead the way. We find the next problem before it finds us. And when we solve it, we don't just fix it for ourselves — the patterns and standards we establish become the foundation the rest of Ramp builds on. That's not a side effect of the job; it's the job.
• We stay calibrated. Speed means nothing if we're moving in the wrong direction. We regularly stop and ask honestly whether what we're working on is still the highest-leverage thing we could be doing — the discipline that makes sure our effort compounds toward what actually matters.

You cannot build the future of finance on shaky infrastructure.

Our Teams

Production Engineering is organized into teams — but we think about teams differently. Teams are mutable. We build them around what needs to be done, not around what we need to do given the teams we already have. The structure below reflects our current priorities; it will evolve as Ramp does.

Right now, we operate across four areas:

• Compute — the foundation everything runs on: container orchestration, networking, load balancing, edge infrastructure, and the deployment systems that get code from engineers' laptops to production reliably and at scale
• Storage — databases, caching, object storage, and the data infrastructure that underpins everything
• Workflows & Messaging — the systems that power Ramp's financial workflows and event-driven architecture
• Developer Infrastructure — the platform that makes every builder at Ramp faster and more autonomous: observability, cost attribution, and CI/CD systems that give teams visibility into what they build and what it costs

What You'll Do

Production Engineers at Ramp are full software engineers who happen to specialize in infrastructure. You write production code, you own systems end-to-end, and you drive technical outcomes across the organization — not just within your team.

As a Tech Lead & Manager, you are a hands-on player-coach: you will lead and grow a team while remaining directly engaged in the technical work. Management at Ramp does not mean stepping away from the technology or the code. You will help set direction, develop engineers, and work alongside the team to deliver consequential infrastructure outcomes.

Day to day, you will:

• Build, coach, and grow a high-performing team. Create clarity, give direct feedback, mentor engineers, and help each person expand their technical judgment, ownership, and leadership.
• Set technical direction for your team’s domain. Identify the highest-leverage problems, define a path forward, bring the right people along, and stay engaged with the team until the work is delivered.
• Build and operate critical infrastructure across Ramp's compute, storage, messaging, and observability stack — owning the systems that handle real financial transactions at scale.
• Drive architectural change — not just flag problems. When you surface a reliability or scalability issue, you own the path forward: you propose the solution, find the owners across engineering, and stay in until it's resolved.
• Partner with product teams at the design phase — reviewing architectures, embedding golden paths, and making it easy to build correctly the first time.
• Build Ramp's next level of scale — you'll be a hands‑on contributor to the most consequential infrastructure shift happening right now: our move to a cellular architecture, enabling Ramp to scale, reach international markets, operate in highly regulated and constrained environments (e.g. FedRAMP), and deliver on enterprise‑grade SLAs.
• Enable AI‑native engineering — as Ramp builds increasingly AI‑powered products, PE is the team that makes sure the platform can support them. You'll proactively partner with product teams on AI infrastructure patterns, define the golden paths that turn one‑off solutions into reusable foundations, and stay ahead of emerging challenges before they become blockers.
• Build developer tooling and self‑service infrastructure — so that other teams can answer their own questions (cost, performance, reliability) without involving PE.
• Participate in on‑call rotation — and more importantly, use every incident as a signal to eliminate the root cause, not just resolve the symptom.
• Lead across the company — PE doesn't just review designs or show up when called. We proactively initiate cross‑team architectural reviews, and we take full ownership of company‑wide reliability and scalability initiatives: identifying the problem, proposing the solution, aligning the stakeholders, and staying in until it's done.

What We Look For

We don't hire for a checklist. We hire for the instincts that make someone exceptional on this team.

The mindset we're looking for:

• You love building teams, mentoring engineers, and helping people grow—and you are equally energized by writing code, reviewing designs, and digging into complex distributed systems.
• You are a true player‑coach. You know when to coach, delegate, and create space for others to lead; you also know when your direct technical involvement will create the most leverage.
• You can set a technical direction, bring people along, and then lock in with the team to make it happen.
• You do not believe managing engineers means stepping away from the technology or the code.
• You can't walk past something broken without wanting to fix it — and you don't stop at the workaround. You find the root cause and eliminate the class of problem.
• You think in systems, not tasks. You understand that "fixing the bug" is step one; making it so the bug can't happen again is the job.
• You move with urgency but without chaos. You know when to go fast and when to slow down and do it right.
• You treat product teams as your users. You build for them, communicate with them proactively, and measure success by how much faster they can ship. But you're also an owner — when something is broken or blocking, you don't wait to be asked. We win when our customers win.
• You leave things better than you found them. Every system you touch, every process you encounter — you move it forward. Not always dramatically, but always directionally. You picked it up in a certain state; you leave it in a better one.

Experience profile:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record of shipping high-quality architectures for critical systems.
• Staff+-level technical leadership: experience setting technical direction and leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives from ambiguous problems through durable production outcomes.
• Experience managing, mentoring, and developing engineers. You create clarity, give direct feedback, and help people grow in technical judgment, scope, and leadership.
• A sustained hands‑on engineering track record. You are comfortable writing and reviewing production code, evaluating system designs, debugging incidents, and making difficult technical tradeoffs.
• Hands‑on experience building and operating distributed systems at production scale.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — you write clean, well‑tested, production‑ready code and set that standard for the team.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred).
• Familiarity with observability and reliability practices, including SLOs, error budgets, alerting, dashboards, and incident response.
• Track record of delivering through cross‑functional coordination: aligning stakeholders, unblocking teams, and staying accountable for the outcome.
• Comfortable using AI tooling and coding agents as part of your everyday engineering workflow — and helping a team use them to move faster and think bigger.

Bonus (not required):

• Experience with cellular or multi‑tenant architecture patterns
• Prior work on workflow orchestration systems (Temporal)
• Contributions to developer experience or internal platform tooling
• Experience in fintech, payments, or regulated industries (FedRAMP, SOC 2)

Benefits Available To All Full-time Ramp Employees (Global)

• Flexible PTO
• Centralized home-office equipment ordering
• Health and wellness stipend
• Budget for intra‑office travel
• Weekly coffee stipend

United States

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you, with partial coverage for dependents
• One Medical annual membership
• 401(k), including employer match on contributions made while employed by Ramp
• Fertility HRA (up to $10,000 per year)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay
• Pet insurance
• In-office perks: lunch, snacks, drinks, and more
• Relocation expense coverage to NYC or SF (if needed)

Canada

• Group medical, dental, and vision coverage through Sun Life
• Life, AD&D, and disability coverage
• Fertility drug coverage (up to $4,000 lifetime)
• Group Retirement Plan with employer match (RRSP + DPSP)
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay, with additional time available at reduced pay
• Employee Assistance Program and virtual care through Lumino Health

United Kingdom

• Private medical insurance through Freedom Elite
• Virtual GP and at‑home care via eMed x Livi
• Workplace pension through Penfold, with salary sacrifice option
• Parental leave: up to 16 weeks (birthing + bonding) or 8 weeks (bonding only) at 100% pay with additional time available at reduced pay

Other Notices

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

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