Engineering Manager, Platform

Company: Finch
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: February 25, 2026

Job Description:

Job Description Job Description About Finch We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work. To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from inception through to completion. Finch is a Series B company backed by a fantastic set of firms, angels, and our developers including General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Homebrew, BoxGroup, YCombinator, Charley (1st business hire at Plaid), Sima (ex-Head of Biz Dev at Plaid), Henrique Pedro (co-CEOs at Brex), Jeff Wayne (co-CEOs at Digits), Immad (CEO at Mercury), Sam (CEO at Vouch Insurance), Karim (CTO at Ramp), and more. About Our Team We're a team of problem solvers who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions. We value velocity, curiosity, empathy, and diverse perspectives. Everyone on the team is excited about the scope of the problems we address and the potential impact our work can have on the global workforce. We realize that the value we provide comes with great responsibilities, and therefore make security and privacy our highest priorities. We come from a diverse set of backgrounds and each member brings different skills to the group. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and potential will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. About You You've been a platform or infrastructure engineer yourself. You understand the difference between infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-an-afterthought. You know what it's like to be paged for a production issue and have used those experiences to build better systems and on-call practices. You care deeply about both technical excellence and team growth. You're energized by unblocking engineers across the organization and improving their developer experience. You can prioritize a backlog of projects, make tough trade-off decisions, and communicate "not yet" with clarity and empathy. You balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership. You thrive in environments with high autonomy and limited hand-holding. About The Role Finch's Platform team owns the infrastructure and developer experience that powers our engineering organization. You'll lead a 4-5 person team with a high-impact backlog spanning infrastructure stability, developer tooling, architectural decomposition, and security. The team handles tech debt paydown (CI reliability, observability consolidation), security work (PII encryption, data contamination prevention), and architectural decisions (monolith decomposition, database scaling). This is high-leverage infrastructure work that enables the entire engineering organization. What You'll Do Live by and champion our values: empathy, execution, humility, curiosity. Manage and grow a 5-person platform engineering team: hiring, 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, and fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration. Own the platform roadmap alongside senior engineers— prioritize across infrastructure stability, developer tooling, security, and architectural improvements (monolith decomposition, database scaling, observability strategy). Make technical trade-off decisions: tech debt vs. new capabilities, build vs. buy, optimize vs. rewrite. You stay close enough to the code to review Terraform and make informed architectural decisions. Partner with product engineering teams and leadership to align platform investments with company priorities and communicate platform constraints and trade-offs. Set platform engineering standards and best practices across infrastructure-as-code, observability, deployment practices, and incident response. Drive continuous improvement of team productivity, engineering processes, and delivery efficiency. What You'll Bring 7 years of software engineering experience with significant focus on platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps work ; 2 years of which include people-management experience. Hands-on platform engineering background — You've built infrastructure, written Terraform, debugged Kubernetes, or improved CI/CD pipelines yourself. Proven ability to manage engineering teams through complex technical projects with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and cross-team dependencies. Track record of growing and developing engineers , including performance management, career development, and difficult conversations. Experience prioritizing large backlogs and making trade-offs between tech debt, new features, stability, and developer experience. Strong technical communication skills— You can explain infrastructure trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and advocate for platform investments. Ability to balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership— You stay close enough to the code to maintain credibility and make informed decisions. Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure improvements that enable product engineering velocity. Bonus: Led a platform or infrastructure team before, experience with high-growth engineering organizations, security/compliance background (PII encryption, SOC2), experience managing distributed or remote teams. Success Looks Like Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus. CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent) Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred) Experience using a distributed messaging system. Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) Proven people management: 1-on-1s, performance reviews, career development, conflict resolution. Roadmap planning and prioritization across competing demands. Cross-functional stakeholder management and communication. Hiring and building high-performing teams. Creating engineering culture and setting technical standards. What We Offer Flexible monthly stipend 100% Health/Dental/Vision coverage and 85% dependent coverage Unlimited vacation policy (with 3 weeks minimum) Parental leave 401(k) Offsite company trips Offices in SF & NYC Finch’s compensation package includes a competitive base salary benchmarked against real-time market data, as well as equity for all full-time roles. We want all full time employees to be invested in Finch and to be able to take advantage of that investment, so our equity grants include a 10-year exercise window. We also offer exceptional benefits, and, for applicable roles, commissions plans. Our minimum salary range for this role is: $210,000 - $230,000 Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on geography, candidate experience and expertise, and other factors Finch is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Keywords: Finch, Petaluma , Engineering Manager, Platform, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California