Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

Job Application for Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering (Remote) at ezCater, Inc

ezCater is the leading food for work technology company in the US, connecting anyone who needs food for their workplace to over 100,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ezCater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from recurring employee meals to one-off meetings, all backed by 24/7 customer service with real humans. ezCater also enables companies to manage their food spend in a single, customizable platform. For restaurant partners, ezCater helps them grow their business by bringing them more orders and new high-value customers. We're backed by top investors including Insight, Iconiq, Lightspeed, GIC, SoftBank, and Quadrille.

ezCater is investing in a next-generation, composable platform that powers future product experiences across the organization. This platform is API-first, headless, and designed to enable teams to build and evolve product capabilities quickly, safely, and at scale.

As Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering, you will lead the teams responsible for the foundation that every engineering team builds on: infrastructure, developer experience, shared libraries, CI/CD, observability, and governance. You will own delivery across developer experience, core platform tooling, and platform infrastructure -- ensuring that domain teams building on the platform have an opinionated, supported path that lets them focus on their domain instead of infrastructure decisions.

This is a hands-on engineering management role. You are close to the work -- reviewing technical designs, pairing with engineers on hard problems, and making informed tradeoff calls across infrastructure, tooling, and developer experience. You came up through engineering, you understand distributed systems and cloud-native infrastructure, and you bring that judgment to every decision about what to build, how to build it, and in what order.

What You’ll Own:

• Delivery across platform engineering: developer experience, core platform tooling (shared libraries, event streaming clients, auth middleware), and platform infrastructure (compute clusters, networking, infrastructure-as-code, observability)
• The opinionated path for building and operating services: language, frameworks, CI/CD, deployment, observability, and governance -- the defaults that come with support out of the box
• Milestone delivery for the platform foundation on a timeline that unblocks domain teams building search, identity, payments, and other capabilities
• Day-to-day engineering management: hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers across the platform teams
• Cross-team coordination: when domain teams need something from the platform, you own prioritization and delivery

What Your Teams Will Build:

• A fresh compute cluster for new platform services, with namespace isolation, modern autoscaling, and clean networking
• CI/CD pipelines (build, test, contract validation, GitOps deployment) that are the single supported path for all new services
• A service template that gives domain teams a working, observable, deployable service in minutes
• Shared libraries and building blocks: event streaming clients, HTTP clients, auth middleware, instrumentation
• Infrastructure modules: reusable, versioned modules for databases, event streaming topics, caching, secrets -- provisioned via infrastructure-as-code
• An observability stack (APM, logging, tracing, alerting) that ships by default with every service.

What Success Looks Like (12-18 Months):

• Domain teams can scaffold, build, deploy, and observe a new service using the platform path without making infrastructure decisions or filing tickets
• The platform foundation is delivered on the milestone timeline, unblocking the first wave of domain services
• Every new service is deployed through the same CI/CD pipeline with consistent observability and operational standards
• Infrastructure provisioning is self-service via versioned modules -- no manual work or ad-hoc configuration
• The platform teams are well-staffed, well-organized, and operating with clear ownership
• Engineering teams view the platform path as the easiest way to ship -- not a constraint to work around.

How You'll Lead:

• Stay close to the technical work: review designs, participate in architecture discussions, and maintain the judgment to evaluate proposals and recognize when something needs a different approach
• Manage and develop engineers directly, with the potential to grow into managing team leads as the organization scales
• Prioritize ruthlessly: the platform backlog will always be larger than the team. Sequence work so that domain teams are never blocked on capabilities they need.
• Drive execution with clear milestones, deliverables, and accountability -- without micromanaging how engineers do their work
• Partner with domain engineering leaders to understand their needs and ensure the platform meets them
• Build a culture of clear ownership, operational excellence, and developer empathy

What You Have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in engineering management or technical team leadership
• A strong technical foundation: you have built and operated distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, or platform tooling. You can evaluate a cluster architecture, a CI/CD pipeline design, or a shared library API with real depth.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes/EKS, infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, service networking)
• Experience establishing engineering standards: CI/CD pipelines, service templates, observability defaults, deployment patterns
• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers
• Strong communication skills: you can translate between infrastructure complexity and team priorities, and represent the platform in cross-team discussions
• A pragmatic, service-oriented mindset: you understand that the platform team's success is measured by the success of the domain teams building on it.