Sr. Engineering Manager, Developer Productivity

Redpanda is a unified platform that combines streaming, SQL analytics, and intelligent connectivity with a governance layer for enterprise AI agents in production. The platform is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and startups, enforcing governance outside the agent's data path to control access and maintain a tamper-proof record.

• 10+ years of experience in software development and delivery.
• 5+ years of experience managing software developers.
• Experience leading teams responsible for developer tooling, CI/CD, release engineering, quality/test infrastructure, or observability platforms.
• Ability to develop strategy and roadmap spanning multiple adjacent charters with prioritization skills.
• Entrepreneurial spirit suitable for a startup environment.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Experience growing a team to 15+ people.
• Working familiarity with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure).
• Technical credibility with engineers building CI/CD, test frameworks, and metrics/logs/tracing pipelines.
• Comfortable collaborating on GitHub with a globally distributed team.

Nice to have:

• Experience running or scaling an internal observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Grafana, Tempo).
• Experience building or operating chaos/fault-injection or large-scale load testing frameworks for distributed systems.
• Experience with artifact/package registry migrations or supply-chain tooling.
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling (e.g., LLM-based agents) to developer workflows, on-call triage, or test/cost analysis.
• Previous experience managing people managers.

Set Strategy and Direction:

• Develop a multi-year strategy and near-term roadmap across Developer Productivity, Quality Engineering, and Observability.
• Sequence investments among CI performance, platform reliability, testing confidence, telemetry quality, and operational cost.
• Define measurable outcomes and communicate progress, risks, tradeoffs, and contingency plans to engineering leadership.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries and operating agreements across adjacent teams.

Lead Platform Execution and Operations:

• Oversee the reliability, scalability, and security of CI/CD, release, artifact, testing, and observability platforms.
• Ensure appropriate service-level objectives, runbooks, escalation paths, and disaster-recovery plans.
• Balance roadmap delivery with operational work, incidents, maintenance, and technical debt.
• Participate in incident response and operational reviews.
• Improve sustainability of on-call, support, and service-ownership practices.

Lead the Organization:

• Build a high-performing team with clear ownership, effective collaboration, and strong technical standards.
• Hire, onboard, coach, and retain engineers and engineering leaders.
• Provide clear and actionable feedback.
• Support career development and succession planning.
• Address performance issues directly and fairly.
• Foster an environment enabling engineers to make decisions, learn from failures, and understand work impact.

Improve Developer and Engineering Outcomes:

• Reduce friction in local development, CI, testing, and release workflows.
• Improve feedback speed and signal quality without sacrificing confidence.
• Facilitate easy adoption of quality and observability capabilities.
• Use developer feedback, operational data, and platform metrics to guide improvements.
• Evaluate AI-assisted engineering workflows with controls, measurement, and human oversight.