Engineering Manager, Platform

Job description

Airbyte is the data and action layer for AI agents. We give agents fast, accurate, authenticated access to business data across hundreds of sources, so they can discover the entities that matter, reason over real-time context, and take action in the systems they read from, not just observe them. We started as the open-source standard for data movement and proved the economics of data integration at scale: hundreds of connectors, thousands of companies, and, since 2020, have raised $181M from leading investors including Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, and Y Combinator. As our CEO Michel Tricot puts it, "the last ten years were all about structured data. The future is all about context." We're now building that context infrastructure for production-grade agents on the same open foundation, as agents become the primary consumers of enterprise data. Our mission is unchanged: make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. That everyone now includes AI agents. THE ROLE: Airbyte is looking for an Engineering Manager, Platform to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure, tooling, and engineering systems that power Airbyte Cloud, Airbyte Flex, and Airbyte Agents. As an Engineering Manager on the Platform team, you'll lead the engineers responsible for cloud infrastructure, deployment systems, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and the internal tooling that powers engineering velocity across the company. Your work directly shapes both how fast engineers ship and how customers experience Airbyte. This isn't a keep-the-lights-on role. You'll make real tradeoffs between engineering velocity, customer-facing reliability, and long-term architecture every week, and you'll help define how AI transforms the way we build and operate software. This role combines people leadership, technical strategy, operational excellence, and platform thinking. You'll help define how engineering works at Airbyte - not just what we build. WHAT YOU’LL DO: - Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Platform Engineers, Fullstack Engineers, and SREs. Recruit engineers who understand that infrastructure decisions are product decisions. - Own the reliability and operational health of Airbyte's production systems. - Define the roadmap for Airbyte's platform: infrastructure, CI/CD, deployment automation, observability, internal tooling, and the product surfaces built on top of them. - Invest in and drive adoption of AI-powered workflows for debugging, release validation, infrastructure management, and developer productivity, moving past experimentation into real operational leverage. - Lead incident response, run blameless postmortems, and ensure systemic fixes follow every outage. Continuously reduce operational toil through automation. - Build leverage: a week-long task this year should take ten minutes next year. SUCCESS METRICS: - Engineers deploy with confidence and ship faster quarter over quarter. - Platform reliability improves as measured by customer-facing SLAs, not just internal dashboards. - Operational toil decreases through automation, not heroics. - Incidents are detected faster, resolved faster, and the same failure doesn't happen twice. - Your team is engaged, growing, and building careers they're proud of. WHAT YOU’LL NEED: - 5+ years of software engineering experience, 2+ years managing engineering teams. - Experience leading Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, SRE, or Developer Productivity organizations. - Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and distributed systems. - Experience operating production systems at scale. - You think about platform work in terms of customer impact, not just engineering elegance. - You've navigated the tension between paying down tech debt and shipping product, and you can articulate how you made those calls. - Excellent communication skills. You can translate platform strategy into language that product, design, and business leaders understand. - You have an insatiable desire to ship. NICE TO HAVE: - Experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows or agentic software development. - Experience building internal developer platforms. - Familiarity with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and cloud-native infrastructure. - Experience with data infrastructure, ETL/ELT, or large-scale distributed systems. - Experience contributing to open-source engineering organizations. - Familiarity with Airbyte, connector ecosystems, or developer tooling platforms. WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS: Platform Engineering is the force multiplier for every engineering team at Airbyte. Your mission is to build the systems, tooling, and infrastructure that enable engineers to move faster while making our platform more reliable, secure, and scalable. Success means every deployment becomes safer, every incident becomes easier to resolve, every engineer becomes more productive, and AI becomes a natural part of how software is built. The best platform teams are invisible—they make everyone else dramatically more effective. That's the team you'll build. LOCATION: - Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco, CA WHY YOU'LL LOVE WORKING AT AIRBYTE: At Airbyte, we believe great work happens when people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to grow. Our market-leading Total Rewards package is designed to help you thrive professionally and personally. Our benefits and perks include: - Flexible PTO with a culture that encourages at least 25 days off annually - 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for all parents - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - 401(k) retirement plan - Professional development budget, conference sponsorship, and book reimbursement - Commuter benefits and monthly internet reimbursement - Breakfast and lunch in our San Francisco office - A collaborative, in-person culture focused on learning, growth, and impact If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all of the requirements! We are not accepting agency submissions or recruiting firm support for this role. Unsolicited resumes will not be considered. Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, familial status, domestic violence victim status, veteran or military status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Airbyte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodations due to a disability.