Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

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About Zello

Zello is a voice-first communication platform, powered by our industry-leading push-to-talk technology, to improve collaboration and productivity for desk-less workers. With over 175+ million users, we’re the #1 rated push-to-talk app in the world, delivering 9 billion (yes, with a B) messages a month. 

At Zello, our company values are at the heart of what we do everyday. We’re proud to serve the frontline, we’re privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe, and we’re honored to support first responders.

And this is where you come in.

We seek an experienced, broadly technical engineering manager to lead and grow our platform team. In this role, you will be instrumental in modernizing our cloud service architecture, addressing reliability and scalability through automation, tools engineering, and a secure infrastructure foundation. Your passion and expertise will directly contribute to our success, and we value your ability to coordinate your efforts and those of others.

At Zello, you'll find a team that is talented, responsible, caring, and eager to learn. We believe in fostering a supportive and collaborative work environment where everyone's contributions are valued. We have fun building software at the heart of mission-critical work in an impressive variety of industries and public service sectors. We value simplicity, excellence, and a focus on getting things done.

This position is based in Austin and reports to the CTO.

After a successful first year, you will

• Have delivered a range of projects improving the reliability, performance, and capability of the platform in a multi-cloud environment.

• Enable the application development teams with tools to quickly publish and validate their work.

• Understand the needs and motivations of your team members to align their work with their capabilities and interests.

• Have added key hires to your group and successfully grown new team members into productive contributors.

What you'll do

• Own project plans, coordinate execution, oversee architecture/design and code reviews, and participate directly in implementation, testing, and support.

• Hold regular 1:1s, periodic reviews, and conduct team meetings.

• Drive the hiring process for new roles by assessing capabilities relative to needs, creating organizational plans, training interviewers, and actively recruiting candidates.

• Drive the professional growth process by identifying opportunities and helping team members meet their goals.

• Facilitate group conversations, review and optimize processes, and find opportunities to make the team 1% better.

• Contribute to the Zello engineering blog and participate in outside events as an ambassador for the technical organization.

Requirements

• Minimum of five years of experience managing teams of at least four engineers.

• Minimum of three years of experience with hands-on work in cloud engineering (AWS or GCP), DevOps, Linux system administration, and/or backend development. We use Ansible and Terraform extensively.

• Superior written and verbal communication skills; comfortable preparing and making presentations.

• Conscientious, good-natured, and enjoy interacting with people.

• Experience managing distributed teams is a plus.

• On-prem to cloud migration experience is a plus.

• The position will require some on-call support; however, we work hard to reduce noise, and your efforts will ensure escalations are rare.

#LI-Hybrid

We hire for potential, passion for our mission, and a knack for solving difficult problems over checking every qualification box. We have competitive pay, equity with significant upside, and intentionally design our benefits to encourage healthy and well-balanced employees, from flexible work schedules to unlimited paid time off. We even offer a sabbatical after every five years of service so you’re able to pursue and enjoy what matters most to you. And of course, we wouldn’t be a technology company in Austin without a ping-pong table and free snacks in our break room. Join us!

Zello provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.