Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Operations

Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud Operations

Posit creates software that helps people understand data and make better decisions in real-world applications. Our core offering is an open-source data science toolchain which is used by millions worldwide, and we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means. 

We’re a Certified B Corporation®, which means we’ve written our open-source mission into our corporate charter. Our commercial products support this work, which helps data scientists manage their work and share the results with others.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the Cloud Operations team. This team works within our Product Development group, we have separate IT and Security teams outside of Product Development. Joining this team will give you the flexibility and influence that comes from working alongside teams building multiple early stage products, but with the stability and work-life balance that comes from working at a profitable company.

The ideal candidate will be a collaborative and adaptable leader. Your diplomatic approach to stakeholder management and strong technical understanding of how software is built and operated will be crucial in helping the team choose projects that help make the entire development organization more effective. 

This is a single team who contributes across several broad areas:

• InfraOps: maintaining and operating shared infrastructure services such as CI/CD, Service Control Policies, and cloud SSO. Being the service owner/defining the shared responsibility model for services used by many product teams like status pages, DataDog, AWS/Azure/GCP, and package mirrors. This area is a major focus, and you would spend a significant portion of your time here.
• DataOps: maintaining and operating the corporate data warehouse, Fivetran, AWS Glue workflows, cloud logging, Cost and Usage Reports, and more.
• Site Reliability Engineering:  Manages the individual SREs that are embedded in our largest SaaS product teams.
• WebOps: operating our marketing web properties including hosting, analytics, and search integrations

What you will own

• Managing a team of individual contributors and leading them in providing value to our stakeholders
• Prioritizing and communicating the roadmap for CloudOps, selecting projects that find the ideal balance between short term productivity, company objectives, and long term organization health
• Vendor negotiations for services this team manages
• Supporting the humans on the team, helping them to grow and flourish

What you will help with

• Collaborating with QA, Engineering, and Security managers across the organization on improving the software development process, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks to empower the team to deliver with the least amount of friction
• Collaborate with engineering teams to implement cloud best practices.
• Improve the security, performance, scalability, and reliability of existing services.

What we will learn from each other

Depending on your background and expertise, some of these will be things you’ll teach us, and some will be areas where you will get to grow as part of the team.

• New perspectives on capabilities, practices, and measures of high-performing technology-driven teams and organizations (DORA report), updating our processes and techniques based on current research about high performing teams.
• Effective communication styles, both within the team, as in specifications and requirements docs, and with stakeholders, as in translating between user needs and technical work breakdowns 

• An appreciation for data science workflows, and some of the tools and methodologies used by data scientists.
• The Posit products and how they empower our customers to do effective data science, along with open-source data science tools like R, Python, and the infrastructure required for machine learning.

Within one month, you will…

• Get to know everyone on the team and become familiar with our current project workload
• Start building relationships with stakeholders to understand their goals and how they align to the team’s objectives
• Review our project backlog and identify which projects are likely to have the most impact
• Get familiar with the existing culture and workflows within the  CloudOps, DataOps, and SRE practices by reading code, reviewing pull requests, asking good questions, and engaging with the substance of our work.

Within three months, you will…

• Successfully guide the delivery of a high impact project
• Participate in planning and roadmapping to help the team identify our best opportunities
• Establish trust with your direct reports, be familiar with their individual growth plans, and start looking for opportunities to enable their ongoing career development
• Report on progress with a predictable cadence, enabling stakeholders to plan product engineering work more confidently.

Within twelve months, you will…

• Coordinate major initiatives that support a key company objective
• Give tactical guidance on how best to deliver complex projects
• Provide career development resources; grow leadership and enable technical achievement across the team

About you

• Empathetic: you enjoy seeing your team realize their full potential, individually and collectively, and appreciate that cultivating these relationships takes time and intention. 
• Organized: you enjoy developing and maintaining systems that ensure that the team nails the details and that things don’t fall through the cracks.
• Pragmatic: you’ve experienced what works well and what doesn’t, but you know that there’s no magic recipe for fostering a healthy, productive team. You listen to understand and then collaborate with your team on solutions that work in the current context.
• Curious: you’re driven to learn new things and continuously improve.