Engineering Manager, Platform

As an Engineering Manager, Platform at PushPress, you'll be responsible for leading the SRE and API teams, ensuring operational health, and overseeing our production backend and API performance. You'll manage SLAs, drive SRE initiatives to enhance application health, and shape the development roadmap for our Public API. This role involves collaboration with cross-functional teams to achieve business goals and maintaining a high-performing engineering culture.

Candidates for the Engineering Manager position at PushPress should have a minimum of 8 years in backend engineering, including at least 3 years of experience managing SRE or API teams. A strong background in API design, microservice architectures, and distributed systems is crucial, as well as expertise in observability and incident management. Proven experience in hiring and developing engineering talent will also be beneficial.

PushPress adopts SRE best practices to ensure the reliability and scalability of its platform. As an Engineering Manager, you'll help implement robust observability and incident response strategies, manage application health, and evolve the backend architecture to enhance performance and fault tolerance, ensuring the platform can handle increased transactions and API calls.

The Public API is a critical component of PushPress’s ecosystem, enabling integrations with partner applications, which enhances the overall functionality of our platform. As the Engineering Manager, you'll define the roadmap for the Public API, develop new capabilities, and ensure it supports the needs of our clients while accommodating growth in the boutique fitness space.

At PushPress, you can expect a collaborative and dynamic team environment that thrives on diversity and inclusivity. The culture encourages innovation and proactive contributions, where your insights are valued, and your leadership can inspire change. You'll be surrounded by technology enthusiasts who share a passion for fitness and a commitment to helping gym operators succeed.

When answering this question, highlight your focus on collaboration, empowerment, and support. Emphasize how you encourage team members to take ownership of their work while providing the guidance they need to excel. Mention specific examples demonstrating how your leadership has led to successful project outcomes.

A strong answer includes discussing your experience with SRE practices, incident management, and observability. Explain the importance of monitoring tools, proactive incident response strategies, and postmortem analyses to continuously improve platform reliability. Sharing past achievements in maintaining uptime can bolster your response.

Discuss strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and user feedback as your primary methods. Illustrate how you would create a roadmap that aligns with business goals while ensuring that the API's functionality addresses developers' and end-users' needs. Citing any previous experience with API development can strengthen your answer.

Mention your commitment to continuous learning and fostering a growth-oriented culture. Highlight how you would tailor development plans for team members, create opportunities for skill enhancement, and facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions. Providing examples of successful mentorship experiences can underscore your approach.

Your answer should reflect proactivity in keeping abreast of industry trends through webinars, reading tech blogs, attending conferences, and participating in professional groups. Demonstrating how you have applied recent learnings to your work can show your dedication to remaining competitive.

Identify challenges like scalability, developer experience, and security. Discuss proactive measures you would implement, such as user feedback incorporation, extensive testing, and robust security protocols. Providing specific examples of past challenges you've successfully navigated will enrich your response.

Emphasize your familiarity with microservice design principles, deployment strategies, and challenges like service communication and data management. Provide specific incidents where you’ve successfully implemented microservices and the outcomes of those initiatives.

Discuss your experience with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, or ELK stack, emphasizing how you use them for incident monitoring and response. You could also mention any tools you've used for CI/CD pipelines or automated testing that contribute to overall application health.

Share a specific example that showcases your collaboration skills, highlighting the project's impact on the business. Discuss your approach to facilitating communication between teams, resolving conflicts, and ensuring alignment toward common goals.

Your answer should stress the importance of aligning engineering objectives with business goals. Explain that while striving for technical excellence is essential, understanding business priorities allows you to deliver high-impact engineering solutions that support company success.