Hands-on Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

O projekcie We are dedicated to making education engaging and accessible through innovative online learning platforms. We develop personalized learning experiences for students, helping them grow in a supportive and interactive environment. Our vision is to elevate online learning to create an accessible and inclusive education curriculum platform where all students can succeed!

As an engineering manager at Miaplaza, your team will build technology with a direct impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students. Every feature we ship, system we scale, and improvement we make contributes to shaping how the next generation learns and discovers their potential. We’re looking for leaders who want their work to matter in classrooms and homes, who care about access to quality education, and who are excited to craft technology that makes a difference in young people’s lives. Here, your impact shapes future generations!

We're moving everything towards GCP and Kubernetes. We’re growing to a scale that no longer matches our legacy architecture and actively investing in modernization. We’re migrating on-premise workloads to GKE, strengthening security and business continuity best practices, and moving toward platform self-service for our development teams. A core goal is to consolidate and shrink the stack, and every migration decision is measured against whether it lowers the daily burden on the team. You’ll need to work with your team balancing both platform initiatives and the operational needs of the engineering teams you serve. You’ll report to our head of engineering and be expected to split your time roughly 50/50 between people management and hands-on development. Prioritization always goes to leading and supporting your engineers.

What’s unique about management at Miaplaza

Miaplaza is a US-based education company, which means we probably are doing things differently than you’ve done in your past experience. Here are a few differences you may notice:

• You will first onboard as a senior engineer for 2 months. You will start to onboard as a manager during month two and will take over the team roughly at 10 weeks. This is non-negotiable as both periods of time are equally important.
• We expect our EMs to spend approximately 50% of their time hands-on, even after they’ve completed onboarding as a senior engineer.
• We emphasize the importance of pedagogical principles. A responsibility is to grow your engineers and those around you.
• We expect you to have full oversight into your direct reports' work; you can’t properly teach if you don’t see the process behind the output.
• Feedback is the norm. You’ll be expected to give meaningful, specific reinforcement and constructive feedback whenever you notice something. You should also expect to receive feedback. Ultimately, everything we do is optimizing ourselves and our company to best support our students.

Our hiring process

As a remote company, we receive a large number of applicants, and finding the best fit for this role is our top priority - that’s why our process is longer than usual. At every stage, we try to be respectful of your time and grateful you’re spending it with us.

• Application and CV Review - Our team will review your application and CV.
• Initial Technical Screen (20 minutes) - You'll be asked some administrative questions and technical questions related to the role.
• Behavioral Interview (1 hour) - Meet with a member of our HR team.
• 1st Technical Interview (1 hour) - Meet with a member of the Infrastructure team to answer technical questions.
• Scenario-based Technical Interview (1 hour) - Meet with a member of the Infrastructure team to work through two hypothetical DevOps scenarios.
• Leadership Interview (1 hour) - Meet with our head of engineering and executive leadership.
• Reference check - We'll reach out to the references you provided.
• Offer & background check - Once you sign your offer, we'll run a background check in accordance with applicable law.

Individuals only - no recruitment agencies.

Zakres obowiązków

• Work with your team to design, build, and operate the infrastructure the rest of engineering depends on: clusters, pipelines, databases, edge, and observability
• Your customers are the other engineering teams. Work with the other Engineering Managers and product development leadership to scope and prioritize platform work
• Set the quality bar for your team. Lead by example.
• Manage, lead, and mentor your team while working side by side with them in code quality, clean infrastructure-as-code, soft skills, best practices, etc
• Lead team trainings, set SMART goals, hold performance reviews, and provide individual feedback recurrently to each of your devs

Wymagania

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years of experience being a mentor/leader, of which:
• 1+ years leading a team, formally or as a tech lead
• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering, of which:
• 3+ years running production workloads on Kubernetes (GKE preferred)
• 3+ years of experience with a major cloud provider and Infrastructure as Code. GCP is our primary cloud and we expect senior-level knowledge of IAM, networking, KMS, GKE, CloudSQL and Secret Manager
• 3+ years of experience operating at a Senior, Staff, or Principal Engineer level.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design and operations
• Experience with GitOps (FluxCD or ArgoCD)
• Experience working directly with engineering teams and other managers as your customers on scoping and prioritization
• Experience leading incident response, including running postmortems

What makes you stand out

Experience leading a team through a significant architectural migration

Experience with consumer platforms at scale

Experience building in regulated environments

Experience operating self-hosted observability stacks (Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Grafana, Tempo, OpenTelemetry)

Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling

Experience supporting .NET/C# application deployments

Experience with database operations (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ)

Experience with Istio or other service meshes