Sr. Engineering Manager: Cloud + Platform (US - East)

About AuthZed: We are the creators and maintainers of SpiceDB and the authorization infrastructure that companies around the world depend on to keep their engineering teams focused on what matters most - their own product. We are a Series A company, fixing broken access control with products that eliminate complex permission management while delivering enterprise-scale performance and consistent access control. AuthZed is a fully remote company with employees across the US, Canada, and Europe. We’re a hardworking and close-knit group with a software-driven culture (yep, even our GTM team understands and loves this technology)! We bring integrity to all our interactions, fostering confidence in decision making - trusting and respecting each voice on our team, every day. Company Values:

• Agency: Everyone should have the capability, freedom, and confidence to bring about changes to our business and product. Organizational processes exist to clearly define our goals, but not restrict how progress is made.
• Collaboration: Success is defined in various dimensions and no single person can be an expert in all of them. Without valuing the opinions of others, finding compromises, and sharing mutual trust and respect, you cannot arrive at the best possible solution.
• Open-mindedness: Without asking questions, testing assumptions, and questioning our pre-existing biases we risk operating within an echo-chamber. We celebrate the representation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds as a catalyst for creating an inclusive work environment that everyone can appreciate.

About the Role: We are investing in our cloud platform as a core product and reliability as a competitive advantage. As we scale, we need a senior engineering leader who can own our cloud platform foundations end-to-end: spanning reliability, infrastructure, and the software systems that power our control plane. This role leads two closely related teams:

• SRE / Infrastructure - reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence
• Cloud Control Plane - Backend and platform software engineers building APIs, distributed services, and systems that power our multi-tenant cloud offering.

This is a hands-on, player-coach role with meaningful technical influence and people leadership. What you’ll own:

• Manage and grow two teams (up to 10 engineers) across SRE and Cloud Platform
• Coach senior engineers through technical ambiguity and design tradeoffs
• Recruit, hire, onboard and develop engineers while elevating the overall strength of the team
• Own the technical direction for infrastructure, reliability, and cloud platform foundations
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to shape the roadmap
• Guide project planning by defining milestones, identifying dependencies, and working toward timely and meaningful delivery
• Ensure the systems and platforms are operable, debuggable, and resilient by design
• Participate in on-call rotations at a sustainable level to stay grounded in real operational issues

What you bring:

• 5+ years in senior technical leadership roles (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform, or Cloud Engineering), including at least 2 years of people management experience, ideally across more than one team
• Track record of balancing hands-on technical leadership with people leadership
• Strong grasp of SRE fundamentals: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, capacity planning, and operational excellence
• Extensive experience with AWS, GCP and Azure managed services
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building and operating distributed systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Kubernetes Operators/Controllers, containerized workloads, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Excellent communication: can translate reliability tradeoffs to product/exec stakeholders and write crisp incident/postmortem artifacts
• Proven ability to translate operational pain points into engineering deliverables

Extra shine:

• Experience working with or integrating AI-powered systems or tooling
• Experience operating multi-tenant or high-isolation customer environments
• Familiarity with distributed databases and performance tuning at scale
• Experience building internal developer platforms or paved paths

Life at AuthZed:

• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology in a rapidly growing sector
• A supported environment where your ideas lead to real impact
• Competitive salary based on experience
• Stock options at an early-stage startup
• Comprehensive benefits including healthcare (US-based) and other insurance
• A full remote and flexible schedule to accommodate different timezones
• Twice-yearly travel for team offsites focused on team bonding, collaboration, and having fun!

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