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Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company with a unicorn valuation, on a mission to empower financial security at scale. The Infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering velocity without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline. The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure.
As Engineering Manager, you will lead and grow this team, set technical direction, and run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. This is a player-coach role where you stay close to the code, architecture, incidents, and people. You will review code and designs, make architecture calls, and contribute directly when needed. Strong individual contributors should respect your technical judgment because you understand the work deeply.
Key responsibilities include:
**Lead and Grow the Team:** Lead, coach, and develop experienced infrastructure engineers across five domains. Hire engineers who work across domains, take ownership of production outcomes, and earn peer trust. Review code and designs, challenge weak decisions, make architecture calls, and unblock the team directly. Give each area clear ownership, backup coverage, growth paths, and a sustainable on-call model.
**Own Technical Direction:** Support technical direction across observability, developer productivity, compute, networking, storage, and data infrastructure. Uphold high engineering standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability. Make clear tradeoffs between speed, reliability, cost, and long-term operating complexity. Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, then improve the system after service is restored.
**Run Infrastructure as a Product:** Understand what Kikoff engineers need and turn that into a focused roadmap with clear priorities. Build paved paths and self-service systems that teams choose because they are faster and safer. Unblock teams through the fastest responsible path, then turn recurring friction into automation or durable platform capability. Measure outcomes for internal customers including delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load.
**Build a Durable Operating Model:** Ensure critical services have an owner, backup, SLO, actionable alerts, dashboard, runbook, capacity expectations, and tested recovery path. Use service health, incidents, delivery data, cost, and customer feedback to prioritize work. Close incident actions and recurring operational gaps. Build an organization that does not depend on constant interrupts, heroics, or one person's memory to stay healthy.
You have 8+ years of engineering experience and 2+ years managing engineers, or equivalent technical leadership and people development. You have a strong infrastructure foundation and can review code, make architecture decisions, and contribute directly. You have experience operating consequential production systems, responding to incidents, and improving systems after problems are solved. You have a track record of hiring, coaching, and developing strong engineers. You can set technical direction and turn ambiguous infrastructure problems into executable roadmaps.
