Senior Engineering Manager - Backend Platform

About the role:

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to help us grow and develop our Backend Platform squad. Our managers take an active role in creating a productive environment for our engineers; be it through removing blockers and impediments, facilitating cross-team collaboration and understanding, or by aiding the team in helping themselves by constantly improving and refining their working practices. You’ll be responsible for managing a team of distributed engineers working across a variety of systems and helping them to perform at their best.

Backend Platform Squad is focused on ensuring the longevity of the Grafana project by adapting our API and storage engines for many autonomous teams. The Backend Platform team ensures that Grafana itself is observable, has the logging necessary to make any bugs shallow, and can efficiently run in installations serving tens of thousands of users. Backend Platform’s work is essential to Grafana as an Open Source project. They do a fair bit of issue triage for the community and work on setting internal standards and leading by example to ensure that everyone working on Grafana’s backend has a strong sense of support from the platform.

In general Backend Platform supports a number of people and teams by being the maintainers of the Grafana API and the database backends.

Your day-to-day will include:

• Regular 1:1s to ensure your direct reports are motivated, happy and engaged
• Coaching and mentoring of your direct reports
• Providing continuous feedback to engineers to ensure that they can add value while maintaining high standards
• Contributing to and reviewing design documents for upcoming features
• Ensuring features are well-defined and ready for development
• Advising your reports on how to break down features into tasks
• Collaborating with our Engineering Leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps and technical designs
• Maintaining headcount by working with our People Ops team to attract and hire talent

Requirements:

• The core focus of the role is on people management but you should have enough technical skills/understanding of our stack to manage a highly technical team/product.
• You will act as project manager as well as working with product owners to ensure the product roadmap is defined and up-to-date
• You have a strong technical background and are capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions themselves
• You will be comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision making, be it technical or product focussed
• While you’re great with people and adept at managing relationships, you still keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts in order to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face
• Ideally you will have a Computer Science degree or equivalent experience and have worked as a Software Engineer before moving into Management
• Our backend is written in Go
• Familiarity with public Cloud would be a strong advantage