Engineering Manager, Backend

Ternary is seeking an Engineering Manager, Backend, to join our team. Global cloud spending will grow by more than 20% annually to over $670B in 2024. Both enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) are actively looking for a FinOps platform that provides visibility, optimization, and automation to manage their cloud spending and maximize business value. Ternary is a leading FinOps platform provider, managing our customers' billions of dollars of cloud spend.

As an Engineering Manager at Ternary, you will play a pivotal early role in driving Ternary’s product growth and leading teams building groundbreaking new products 0>1. You will lead a small team of smart engineers driving a slew of features powered by data, machine learning and AI models. This is the strategic area Ternary is investing in both the near term and long term to build our position as a leader in FinOps platforms. Reporting directly to our VP of Engineering, you will inspire and mentor team members to perform at their best.

About us:

We are passionate about building a platform that excels in FinOps, one that we wish we had in our past roles as engineers, financial analysts, and leaders. Our founding team boasts deep experience, with many members having been early employees at leading cost management/FinOps products. We've leveraged this expertise to develop an advanced platform that serves enterprise and MSP customers operating at scale. We are well-funded and have plenty of runway to succeed. At Ternary, we value being biased toward action, acting with urgency, quick execution, and passion for supporting our customers.

You:

• 2+ years of Engineering Management experience - including mentoring and coaching Senior developers in early-stage and enterprise companies.

• Prior management of backend feature teams.

• Want to keep your sleeves rolled up as a player-coach. A hands-on manager who is willing and adept at delving into the details, remaining hands-on coding, producing technical designs and conducting code reviews.

• Passionate and adept at learning new knowledge and skills, skilled at quickly ramping up in new areas.

• Have a bias for action, and don’t let sensitive topics fester. Interested in promoting these traits within your direct reports and greater Product Delivery org.

• Technical depth allows you to develop and mentor others and build credibility with your team.

• Experience interacting with customers, senior executives, and business leads.

• Experience establishing and measuring team goals.

• Excellent critical thinking and communication skills.

• Regularly consider business lens and tradeoffs even for deeply technical engineering problems.

• Experience in building platform products, and driving algorithmic and AI powered features is a bonus.

• Embody a startup mentality of taking ownership and driving initiatives forward with minimal supervision. 

• Uphold a high bar by participating in technical discussions, providing feedback on specs, and making recommendations.

• Are excited to own new initiatives and take them from 0 to 1.

• Ship and own high-impact products end-to-end with high quality.

• Are an empathetic person and active listener who loves building solutions to help others.

• Have experience in data warehouses and query engines, or classic Big Data technologies: BigQuery, Redshift, Athena, Snowflake, Hadoop and/or Spark.

Responsibilities

• Guiding and supporting your team to solve the most impactful projects for our customers. 

• Understanding and supporting direct reports in their career development and growth while balancing overall project priorities, team morale, technical debt, and customer needs.

• Lead, hire, and grow a high-caliber team of backend engineers.

• Cultivate a culture of blame-free incident analysis and learning.

• Act as the tech lead of the team, collaborate with product managers, engineering managers and other stakeholders. 

• Lead mission-critical projects and ship high quality products.

• Work in, or be willing to learn, multiple programming languages: API and backend in Go, Data hacking in SQL (BigQuery), and experience with distributed task execution (Temporal, Airflow).

• Build up an enterprise-grade ELT stack based on BigQuery and written in Go. If there's cloud-based billing or usage data out there, we want to ingest and activate it in our platform in the most secure and performant way possible.

• Research, evaluate, and apply machine learning and AI models to develop features such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and scenario modeling.

• Use the latest Google Cloud functionality to deliver features more easily and reliably. Keep our cloud footprint clean and documented using Terraform.

• Share responsibility for the day-to-day operation of our platform.

• Mentor other members of the team.

Comp and benefits:

• Company-sponsored travel to interact with colleagues several times a year.

• We provide generous health benefits, 401(k) plan, and a WFH budget for you to set up your home office.

• Equity compensation so that all employees can participate in Ternary's success.

• The team culture is the best of what you would expect to see at a startup combined with a level of maturity you would see at a much larger company.

At Ternary, we value diversity. We are an equal opportunity employer: we do not discriminate on the basis of racial orientation, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Ternary is a remote-first company.